Sickening

I went to get my post out of the mailbox this morning, and alongside the leaflets for the local gym, 4 star pizza, bills and other assorted junk, I found a leaflet for some local hotel saying "Book your Christmas party now!". For Gods' sake people, it's not even August yet! Is bad enough when the decorations go up the week after Halloween, but July? Jesus!

A bit freaky.....

From yesterday's news:

"July 26, 2006 Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.
..............
The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel."

Psalm 93 starts with

"God, do not be silent; God, be not still and unmoved!
See how your enemies rage; your foes proudly raise their heads.
They conspire against your people, plot against those you protect.
They say, "Come, let us wipe out their nation; let Israel's name be mentioned no more!"""

A bit freaky eh, seeing as what's happening in Lebanon at the moment??

not much surprise here:

You are a Social Moderate (43% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (30% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

nine million bicycles - at last.....

Well, I've finally heard that Katie Melua song, "Nine Million Bicycles". If I had a quid for every time someone asked me either while I was there or when I came back, "so are there really 9 million bicycles in beijing then?" What was I supposed to answer, "no there's only 8,995,451 actually, I counted them myself". Grr.......

Am a bit disappointed in this one.......

You Are 66% Evil

You are very evil. And you're too evil to care. Those who love you probably also fear you. A lot.

How Evil Are You?

astrology - invaluable advice or a load of bollox?

I'm not sure how we got onto the topic, but one of my friends here today said that apparenly she was going to meet that special someone today, because her horoscope said so.

Star signs, god love 'em. You can look at 3 horoscopes for the same star sign and see 3 totally differnt things

I'm a Taurus, so I decided to see what I had in store for today.

Astrology.com says:
A certain someone wants you to get a little closer, but you're not sure if you're ready for all the demands an increased sense of intimacy will place upon you.

my.horoscope.com says:
Just what you don't need and didn't ask for – a stressful or unhelpful exchange with either your date, your romantic other, or someone you have your eye on.

the LA times horoscope says:
Tell others what they can do to help you make an even bigger difference in your community.

astrology-online.com says
Your versatile mind and common sense will allow you to come up with various solutions. Your anger may be impossible to contain if you get into debates with family members. Business trips might prove unproductive.

Astrologyzone.com says:
You seem to be mulling over a move, renovation, rental, or even the purchase of a house or condo, but you seem hesitant. You want to act decisively, but you can't quite get the pieces together. Mars, the action planet, is now in your fourth house of home and orbiting very close to Saturn, the planet of caution, during most of the month. This is a hot and cold, stop-and-go combination of planetary energy, so you may feel a bit frustrated that things aren't coming together as quickly as you'd like.

Closer to home, horoscope.co.uk says:
Your mate or partner could have good news to share, and it might involve finances. Even so, you have a choice to make today. Compromise and consideration of others involved are important.

and the Irish Independent says:
Your popularity is set to fly off the Richter Scale! Don’t let it go to your head. Continue to question people’s motivations. Bear in mind that you are wrong some of the time. However, your own judgement is all you have. So you listen to your heart and soul. Take the risk, make the connection, and don’t waste an opportunity just because you didn’t see it coming.

So which one do I go by?

Apparently today I may have an argument with my "significant other" (never mind the fact I don't have one) over my committment issues, or possibly over some good financial news they've just given me, which may have something to do with buying a house (which I'm not looking to do). I'd better not get pissed off about it tho, especially with my family, but it's ok, my verstaile mind will find a way out of the situation and as a result I'll be very popular with everyone. Oh yeah, and I shouldn't go on a business trip either (wasn't going to anyway, my company wouldn't send me across the street these days!).

And there was me thinking I was going to have a boring day!

useful travel guides for iPodders......

Found this link a few mins ago, travel guides for your iPod! They're free as well. unfortunately they're only for iPod Photos so I won't be able to look at them on my poor little mini. ah well, still pretty useful.

cynical? moi?

You Are 68% Cynical

You're a full blown cynic... and probably even skeptical of these results. You have your optimistic moments, but most likely you keep them to yourself.

How Cynical Are You?

hee hee

This could be fun if ppl notice...... :-)

Alcohol is a strange thing.....

I was out last night and decided for a change to stick to shorts (well, the fact we were trying to get my flatmate hideously drunk at her going-away do had somethign to do with it too). Strange thing was tho, I was drinking way more than I'd had the night before, but I wasn't getting as drunk. I was drinking Bacardi Limon before we headed out, then vodka, Jameson whiskey, and aftershock in the nightclub, and then when we gor back to the flat we polished off the rest of the bottle of limoncello and then started on some schnapps type stuff I'd brought back from Austria. So, call it somewhere around a dozen shots. And yet, I was more sober than I had been the night before when I'd only had 4 pints!

So, it seems for me, it's better to drink shots than drink pints!

Men's fashion - shades of gay?

I was just out doing a bit of clothes shopping, and I noticed a bit of a worrying trend in the "in" colors for guys this season. The shops were full of crap in some pretty gay colors. Pink. Lemon. Powder Blue. Light Brown. What the fuck? Either that or white short-sleeved striped shirts - still gay looking, or some seriously flowery looking shirts. And the lads at work were taking the piss out of the Tommy Bahama shirts I got in Beijing! I know when H&M opened here the clothes were pretty much meterosexual, but now it's spread to everwhere else. I suppose it doesn't really matter, I'm not really a fashion type anyway (not young, tall or skinny enough). Still, worrying to see!

I blame David Beckham. he was the one who really kicked off the whole "metrosexual" or JGE ("Just Gay Enough") thing. And speaking of which:

Yup, the England captain has followed in the wife's footsteps and gone and brought out a perfume. I wonder does it come with a little helium bottle so that you can sound like him as well?

The Code

Well, I've seen the Da Vinci code at the second attempt. It's not as bad as all the reviewers make it out to be. It's pretty faithful to the book actually, which is rare enough in a film.

• Tom Hanks didn't do as badly in it as I thought, and Audrey Tatou isn't a bad Sophie (pretty cute too) but there were some unfortunate casting choices. Namely Alfred Milona as the cardinal - maybe it's me, but after Spiderman 2 I had trouble seeing him in this one as anyone but Doc Oc. Paul Bettany has defintely the best role in the film tho, as Silas. Genuinely creepy!


• People are complaining that the plot is very stop-start - of course it is, the book was like that, and they stuck to the book!


• I wonder how long Teabing was waiting for someone to come along and ask about the grail, so that he could show them that wonderful flashy presentation on the Last Supper he'd spent so long working on....


• There were a few gaps in it from the book - like they never bothered explaining why the guy from the bank bothered to drag them off and try to steal the codex. Who was he exactly?


• You'd hate to be in Sophie's shoes at the end of the film. "You're the last living descendant of Christ, you have to continue on the bloodline" - talk about pressure!


• Anyone who has their religious beliefs changed by this film is too weak-willed to deserve them anyway. Run little ones! Don't listen to Tom Cruise, he'll take your soul and give it to the aliens! And your wallet too!

As an aside, I was standing outside the theater waiting to go in, and I was wondering why the odd person going past me was throwing me dirty looks. When I turned around to goin, I realised why - I was standing beside a poster for the new film "United 93", and I happened to be wearing my New York t-shirt! Oops!

Da Vinci vs Bin Laden

Well, I almost got to see the Da Vinci code last night. I went to the cinema at about 7:15, and found out that not only was the 8pm show booked out, but so was hte 8:30 and 9:30 shows. Also, they wouldn't let me book for tonight either, so will have to go earlier tonight. It wasn't a total loss though, there were sone nice earnest christian types outside handing out copies of the Irish Catholic newspaper which had an article saying why the Da Vinci Code was a load of crap (altho in a polite way).

This got me thinking. Here is a film which is basically saying that everything we've believed in for 2,000(ish) years is wrong, and the most extreme reaction is maybe a few people standing outside the cinema with placards, and the Thai film censor cutting the last few mins where they make the "shocking" revelations. And yet, a few months ago a Danish magazine published a few cartoons showing the prophet Mohammed, and muslims all over the world were rioting blockading danish goods and calling for the death of the cartoonist and for some reason every american on the planet (because while you're rioting there's nothing like a chant of "death to the Great Satan" to keep the crowd worked up). So, on one hand you have a film which sticks two fingers up at an entire belief system, and on the other hand you have a few cartoons about a guy in a turban who may or may not be the prophet Mohammed, shown in a slightly unflattering light. The reactions? On one hand, you have a few people standing outside the cinema saying "no, don't go to see this", and on the other you have burning, rioting and killing. Or:

Christian's reaction to film (for fans of Fr. Ted)

Muslim's reaction to cartoons

Does this strike anyone else as being slightly out of proportion? If Islam was a person, it'd be in anger management classes now, or in therapy. What is it about that particular religion that turns people into suicidal nut-jobs? Sure, the cartoons were offensive, but there's thousands of offensive cartoons out there about Jesus, and do you see any of our uber-religions whackos strapping on a semtex vest? Do you think that there are any cinemas going to be torched over this one, or big crowds baying for Dan Brown or Tom Hank's blood? Islam is a religion of over a billion people, but it looks like the inmates have taken over the asylum, or at least the public face of it.

This debate has ben run a million times on a trillion blogs, so I'm not going to go into it again. I have a few possible reasons though why the fundamentalists have been allowed to go so far:

• The Mongols: Back in 1258 the Mongols sacked Baghdad and kiled the Caliph. The Caliph was the direct descendant of Mohammed, and so was the central authority figure in Islam - sort of like the Islamic Pope. With the Caliphate gone, there was no one central figure to lay down the law when extreme sects started sprouting up. Basically they had no-one with the authority to say "I've been speaking to the Big Man, and he's pissed at you. Quit your fool-acting or you're going to hell".
  
• Oil: It's always bee a case with American forign policy that if it were a choice between spreading democracy and preserving the status quo, they've always gone with the staus quo. if the americans weren't so scared of the Saudis and Kuwaitis turning off the oil pumps they would have gone in and bitchsmacked the first guys to go on about he "great Satan" quicker than you can say "Collateral Damage".

¡Campeones!

Força Barça! :-)

the vegetarian crusade?

I found this on El Reg on friday: someone wrote an essay on why being a vegetarian is stupid, and after a few militant veggies complained, the author got their college computer access removed. So much for freedom of speech!

Most of the aricle goes through the reasons that ppl say they became vegetarian, and proceeds to rubbish all of them. The article is pretty tongue-in-cheek, and the only ppl I can see this turning off vegetarianism are the kind of ppl who were never really into it in the first place. Then again, there are always going to be ppl out there who aren't happy unless they're morally outraged about something (a lot of heavily religious ppl fall into this category as well). I always found vegetarian food to be pretty bland and uninspiring, so maybe the lack of excitement in their diet has made these ppl lose their sense of humour as well.

Or maybe it's all about control. People with strong views on stuff always tend to see the world in black and white: "there's my way and then there's the wrong way". So, if anyone looks like they're attacking their views, no matter in how mild a form, that person must be eliminated or neutralised. My attitude is "God save us from fanatics of all shapes and sizes" (of course, instead of "God" you can insert your deity of choice there, I don't care). You have your views on things, and I have mine. We'll make a deal, you don't try to shove your views down my throat and I won't try to change your mind either, or tell you I think your views are full of shit. Does anyone really think that if I'm eating a burger and someone says to me "you know, a cow died to provide you with that meal", that I'm just going to thwack my head with my hand, say "Of course! Why didn't I see this before! How can I have been so wrong all these years?" and go off and never eat meat or wear leather again? I'm more likely to say something to piss of my "veggie evangelist" like "yup, and damn tasty it is too!", or "Really? I'd better make sure its sacrifice wasn't in vain then", and keep eating (or maybe offer them some).

In the interests of free speech (and pissing off militant veggies), the article can be found here.

My god! A Metro for Dublin?

I just saw this in the newspaper:

"WORK is under way on a new €1.5bn underground DART line through the heart of Dublin city centre, it was learned yesterday.

The interconnector rail line, from Docklands to Heuston Station, will quadruple the greater Dublin area's rail service capacity from the current 25m passenger journeys annually to 100m."

It goes on to say:

" The proposed interconnector route will see DART trains from Balbriggan and Howth branch off after Clontarf Road and go underground at Docklands station, where the line will connect with the Luas.

It will continue to Pearse station, connecting with what will be the Maynooth to Bray/Greystones DART.

At St Stephen's Green it is to connect with the Luas and the Metro to the airport before continuing to High Street and Heuston, again linking with Luas, intercity and commuter trains before continuing above ground to Hazelhatch and the Kildare commuter line. "

Apparently there'll be another DART line from the Docklands down to Heuston as well. So, is Dublin transport finally entering the 20th century???

Then again, they're just talking about it at the moment. Looking at how long it took to do the Luas lines and the Dublin Port Tunnel, I'm not optimistic that I'll see this new integrated public transport system in my lifetime. Hell, they were talking this time last year about being close to putting in a new ticketing system in the city center dart stations, where you had to swipe your ticket through as you exited as well as entered, but there;s no sign of that yet either.

expenses for beijing trip

Well, I'm just after trying to put in my expense report for my trip to Beijing. I'm having some problems with it tho - the tool won't let me enter all my expense items. Every time I try to put in the cost of the apartment rental, I get a message saying "Total of expense items exceeds maximum allowed".

I had to put in a helpdesk call to get it sorted, and was a mite surprised when I got back a mail saying the reason this is happening is because in the expense tool there's an automatic $5,000 limit on any expenses for the Ireland office. Thing is, no-one seems to know about this - none of my managers knew, and it isn't documented on the travel policy that there's a limit either. Seems I'm the first one in the Ireland office to hit this limit! It's not often that I get a warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment around this place, but I have one today! :-)

Coffee

Well, I went and overdid it on the coffee last night. A few of us went out to a Lebanese restaurant, and of course there was Lebanese coffee on the dessert menu. lebanese coffee is pretty uch as strong as Turkish coffee, but has a few spices added to the mix - not as much as Moroccan coffee (mmmm....) but still pretty strong stuff. What was unusual in this restaurnat was that instead of just bringing along the little shot-glasses of coffee, the waiter brought out the cups, then brought out the coffee pot and poured our drinks - and then left the stil half-full pot on the table! In a moment of madness I did a couple of refills. By about 4am last night I was really starting to regret doing that..... The last one was especially bad, was so thick you could actually feel the coffee grounds on your teeth after. Powerful stuff!

Where is eye-raq again?

I found this article today in the Irish Indo:

Iraq . . . isn't that up near Alaska?

MOST American young people can't find Iraq on a map, even though US troops have been there for more than three years, according to a new geographic literacy study released yesterday.

Fewer than four in 10 Americans aged 18-24 in a survey could place Iraq on an unlabeled map of the Middle East, a study conducted for National Geographic found.

Only about one-quarter of respondents could find Iran and Israel on the same map.

While 69pc of young people picked out China on a map of Asia, only about half could find India and Japan and only 12pc correctly located Afghanistan, where the US has troops.

"I'm not sure how important it is that young adults can find Afghanistan on a map. But that is symptomatic of the bigger issue, and that's (US young adults) not having a sense that things around the world really matter," said John Fahey, president of the National Geographic Society.

Half of respondents said it was "absolutely necessary" to know how to read a map, but a large percentage lacked the basic skills.

In general, natural disasters appear to have a limited impact on young Americans' view of the world.

Only 35pc identified Pakistan as the country hit by a catastrophic earthquake last October and 29pc thought it happened in Sri Lanka.

The study was conducted in face-to-face interviews with 510 respondents in the continental United States in late 2005 and early 2006.

Now this is kinda scary. I know there's the old Gulf War (well, Gulf War I) joke about "Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student - at least they can find Baghdad.", but now it's been proven true! So what exactly do they do in geography class then over there? Then again, we're talking about the country whose education system is based in "the three R's" - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.......

Reinstalling laptop - again

Well, here I go again. Re-installing my laptop to get rid of all the cruft. Let's see how things bloat out this time:

• Clean WinXP install: 2.50Gb


• All drivers added: 2.63Gb


• Service Pack 2 installed: 3.77Gb


• All windows updates added: 4.67Gb


• All my main apps (browser, firewalls, office etc) installed: 6.08Gb

So, once you have all of your crap up to date and installed, a "workable" windows install comes out as nearly three times the size of what you get from putting in your install CD!

I made one slight little boo-boo tho. Was trying to be smart, and burned a winxp CD with winrar and aceFTP on it, so that as soon as the machine was installed I could FTP over to the machine I backed everything up to on, pull over all my stuff and unrar it in one go - no need to go messing with different install CDs. One slight problem - I should have also added the drivers for my ethernet card onto the CD as well, as aceFTP couldn't connect to the non-existent network to get to the machine to pull things over. Ah well, you live and learn I guess...... I got around it using my trusty iPod - I hooked it up to the machine I had me stuff on, transferred over my drivers, hooked it up to the laptop and away I went!

I finally got to the stage of connecting to automatic updates, and even after I have SP2 installed, I get hit with having to add *43* more "critical security updates", plus another 9 optional software and 2 optional hardware updates. I dunno about you, but any company who produces a big-ass service pack to fix all the issues since the OS released, and then has to throw another 43 critical updates on it a year later, still isn't fully embracing the whole "trusted computing" secure-by-design philosphy.....