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For the second time today, it's snowing outside my office! Shame it's a teeny bit warm & wet (ooh-er) for it to be sticking to the ground, and consequently preventing me from coming into work tomorrow, but what can you do (Hope?! Pray?). There's supposed to be 8 inches of snow on the Dublin Mountains tonight, maybe it'll make it's way towards Dun Laoghaire...?
UPDATE: It's stopped now. But the clouds look very snowy over Howth, and they're heading this way. :-)
Some clever lad has had a bash at the Anagram Transit Map meme that's been doing the rounds, with a map of the train lines in Dublin. It's pretty funny (in parts). Shame he seems to have 'forgotten' to anagramise a few of the stations, but still worth a look.
I don't know if news of the riots in Dublin on Saturday travelled across the water, and it's already been blogged to death by several more 'journalistic' bloggers than I, but I might as well throw in my 2 cents worth and what I think of the whole thing.
I'm not even going to bother to comment on the rioters themselves, or the loyalist marchers, as neither side deserves any comment. I will, however, mention the ineptitude of the Garda Síochána in initially posting only 250 officers along the route of an extremely controversial parade in the first place. Given the size of protests in Northern Ireland during essentially pro-Britain loyalist parades, surely they must have forseen that this would not be the friendliest of occasions, especially in Dublin, where (since the civil war) an Orange/Loyalist parade/march is (I quote) 'unprecedented'?
I also would like, after the above 'diss' of the Gardaí, to praise them in their swift response when the parade and protest turned into a full-blown riot and street battle. From what I saw on the news, and in the papers, they really took care of the situation in a professional way. If only there had have been another few hundred of them, perhaps the thugs responsible for the violence would have been cordoned away from the general public a bit quicker and with less damage and injury. But hindsight is always 20-20 isn't it?
Anyhoo, the real shame is that this happened on a rugby weekend, so the city was full of Welsh (and other) revellers and supporters, over in Baile Átha Cliath for a bit of a hooley and a nice game of rugger (which we won 31-5, wahey!). What a pity they were subjected to seeing bigotry and hooliganism of this order on what would otherwise have been a quiet Saturday afternoon in my beautiful hometown.
Fuck the fucking bigoted bastards.
Don't drink on a School Night.*
*Much as I love unexpected/unscheduled late-night drinking sessions, I really must learn to just say 'no' when I have to work the next day, and especially when I have to be in EARLY the next day (that's today by the way). My head hurts...
There was a programme on RTÉ 2 last night about the effect the Moon has on the inhabitants of it's nearest celestial neighbour. Among several fascinating sequences including the religious significance of "devine" occurances of annular eclipse's (and all eclipses) like the one shown on the right, and the Callanish Sleeping Beauty, where every year the Moon traces a path along a range of hills in the shape of a 'sleeping beauty'. There was also a sequence where coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean released all their little tiny reef sperms and eggs into the sea during a particular phase of the lunar cycle, at a certain time of the year. This phenomenon of saltwater lunar orgies is also prevalent among a large variety of fish and other marine life.
"So basically", I pondered, turning to Andy, "the sea is fuckin' crammed full of fish jizm?!"
Without pause, Andy replied:"That must be why it's so salty".
So apparently I've been tagged by Tatiana. Yes folks, it's meme time again (already...?)! So here we go, five weird habits.
I constantly 'line up' objects aroud me into right-angles and parallel lines, but only at home, never in work (hence my desk in work being in a terrible state).
I brush my teeth exactly the same way, every time, rhythmically. 32 strokes top, bottom, inside, outside, front.
I check my pockets every time I leave somewhere, and therefore never lose anything, ever.
I talk to myself when I'm absolutely sure that no-one can hear me, and have entire two-sided conversations, again, with myself.
I love making lots of noise in the kitchen, closing cupboards and breadbins with a huge 'BANG', rattling cutlery, pots and pans, etc. I have no idea why I do this.
So I was in the chemist getting a prescription, idly standing around waiting, looking around.
"Hmmm... vitamins. I should probably get me some of those. Fisherman's Friend! They're great they are. Gillette razors... I wonder when that new Fusion's coming out. It's got SIX blades! COOOOL... Polaroid Sunglasses... yeah RIGHT... Sanitary Towels for men......"
Hang on a gosh-darned minute now.
(look again)
WTF? I believe I am 'flabbergasted', but I've never been flabbergasted before to my knowledge, so I'm not quite sure. Perhaps I am hallucinating? I don't feel faint or anything, so I pick up the prescription and head back to work, and hit up the big G for the word on the street.
So apparently they make sanitary towels for men now. Well ok then.
(thank the FSM I didn't embarrass myself by asking what they were for)
Why I love my girlfriend:
Nikki: "When is pancake Tuesday, is it next Wednesday?"
Me: "Err... I think it might be Tuesday..."
:-)
So I see Simon Cowell is looking for budding entrepeneurs and tinkerers to take part in his new show, 'American Inventor'. Entrants from across the US of A will compete to see who can come up with the best 'product concept'. It's a good idea, but I really don't think Cowell is necessarily the best person to oversee/produce this show, and the name 'American Inventor' is a bit of a misnomer, as they're looking more for entrepreneurs than inventors when it comes down to it.
I think the BBC show 'Dragons' Den' is the best show I have seen using this idea. If you haven't seen it, basically each week someone comes in with an business plan/concept, and has to persuade a panel of five business investors to give him the dough to finance it. All they need is one of the panel to say yes to the amount they need, but if no-one wants to give them the that exact amount of money (or more), they get nothing. I think Cowell is actually better suited for the Dragons' Den idea than the American Inventor one, but if they'd used that format they would've had to give the BBC a bob or two, rather than claiming it as a 'new concept'.
(Cowell's next project after 'American Inventor' is 'Duets', kinda like American/Pop/X/Idol/Factor but with two entrants at a time. Now there's an original idea. I'm like, so looking forwardn't)
Can you see this video?
Chances are if you don't live in Europe, you can't (If you can't see it, it's about a minute long, and shows the US army blowing up an ammunition dump at night). According to this post on Screenhead, it is not viewable to people living in America. Now why do you s'pose that is? And what's the point? You know someone is going to download, convert and upload it immediately to a million other sites, so why bother, Google? WHY? It doesn't even show anything exciting/pornographic/controversial for crying out loud (It doesn't show anything at all in fact, coz it's really dark).
UPDATE: Turns out it wasn't Google who censored the vid, it was whatever dude that uploaded it. Which is slightly more 'ok', and slightly more confusing.
After seeing this '4 Things' meme on several other blogs, I thought seeing as it's been a slow week relatively speaking, I might as well give it the proverbial 'bash'.
4 jobs I've had in my life
1) Builders Labourer
2) Door-To-Door Salesman
3) Follow Spot Operator/Flyman/Stage Hand/General Slave (all in one establishment)
4) Theatre Technical Manager
4 movies I can watch over and over
1) Superman (I & II)
2) The Empire Strikes Back
3) It's A Wonderful Life
4) Brazil
4 places I have lived
1) Garristown
2) Sheffield
3) Sallynoggin
4) Err... That's kinda it! For about another two months (at the most, I hope) anyway.
4 tv shows I like to watch
1) 24
2) The Simpsons (watching it right now)
3) Family Guy
4) Pimp My Ride (oh.... piss off, stop laughing)
4 places I have been on holiday
1) New Zealand
2) Majorca
3) Devon
4) Allehies, West Cork
4 things I like to eat
1) Marmite on Toast
2) Botticelli's Italian Gelaté (Ice-Cream)
3) The Natural Confectionary Company's Party Animals ( The Big Mix, with SNAKES!)
4) Sandwiches
4 websites I visit daily
1) Boing Boing
2) Rocketboom
3) s e v i t z d o t c o m
4) The Palace Of Lord Danzor The Destructor
4 places I would rather be right now
1) Antarctica
2) Having Dinner In My Mam And Dad's
3) On A Cheap-As-Chips Sun Holiday With Nikki
4) Outer Mongolia
My lungs are full of gunge, my throat is in flitters and hurts when I cough. What a total fucking waste of a midweek day off. I should probably stop smoking really (but I loooove smoking... mmmm... lovely fags...), but it really seems to be a genuine infection of some description. If I go to the doctor he'll just give me antibiotics and charge me ?50. So, soup and cough mixture and blankets are the order of the day.
Missed my 6th of 12 swimming lessons last night too, due to cough splutter ow ow ow groan (lie down). Bummer.
</whinge>
...And we drank some wine, and chatted for ages about stuff. And we gave each other cards. And loads of hugs. And then 'we' watched Desperate Housewives, and went to bed. Best Valentine's day in ages. Anyone else do anything nice/nicer/nicest?
(and I don't just mean those who are attached, I was single for many, many years and sympathise with the plight of the single person on Valentine's)
So once again we're starting another loooong day in the life of Jack and the gang. I'm not going to review much of what happened in the first couple of hours, except to say that yes, it was good (two major recurring characters killed in first ten minutes?!). Can't wait to see what happens next.
Did anyone else watch it? HELLO? I think they must've been paying attention to the comments on Dan's post about how unrealistic the computer systems in 24 are. In day 5 episode 2, Jack actually tells Chloe the IP address of the computer he's at (and it's an actual proper IP address) so she can sent a decription program to it. Which is slightly more realistic than the much-criticised 'send that to my screen' malarkey (although I did hear the 'send it to my screen' line at least twice in the episode).
Anyway, I'll definitely be incommunicado from 9pm-11pm next Sunday, coz it'll be 9am in 24 land, and Jack's in trouble... :-)
...I have absolutely no idea! And yet there appears to be an oversized light-sword of some description embedded in the ground in the Docklands in Dublin...
Can someone indicate to be the exact significance of this 'monument'? Or is it a 'sculpture'? Whatever it is, it's definitely a lightsaber. Seriously. No really, it is!
I wonder was there a battle between two enormous Jedi on the roof of the Millennium Tower (the building in the background) or something. That seems the most likely explanation...
[UPDATE: I have done a bit of research as to what exactly the significance of this particular 'thing' is, and have come up with... nothing. Nada. Anyone else know what the story is?]
Apparently I don't know my SDRAM from my DDRAM either (either that or a HP desktop from 2000 doesn't support more than 128 megs of RAM per slot?). And apparently neither does your average 'guy behind the counter' at PC World. Needless to say, sister's computer still cream-crackered.
[/geek]
[UPDATE: It seems that a 6-year-old HP desktop really doesn't like 256MB DIMMs at all, 128MB bought, works like a charm]
I was at my parents' house last Autumn and was outside having a cigarette, when the rooks came in to roost and started making this incredible racket. I ran in to grab my camera, but missed the cresendo, although I got a pretty good sample, as seen in this clip.
The noise would drive some people mad, but personally, I like the sound of rooks, but then again, I grew up with this tree outside my window. As with previous vids, this one is a teeny bit dark, but it's the sound that's important (that and the arty pan-and-twist towards the sky at the end!).
In the latest issue of 'Wired' magazine there's an article entitled 'Geeks in Toyland', which details development of the next generation of LEGO's award-winning programmable robotics kit, Mindstorms NXT. I found the bit about the software licencing particularly interesting reading:
"Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a "right to hack" into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild"
Isn't that great? Wouldn't it be great if more companies thought like that? Seeing as most software companies want the 'right to hack' into your computer to make sure you're not doing anything 'wrong' with their precious software.
I *heart* LEGO/LEGO kicks ass.
As mentioned earlier, my Attchoo! Festival photos are now up on Flickr. For those of you (that's most of you) who aren't aware of the Attchoo! phenomenon, it's an multicultural arts/multimedia movement, which manages to mash pretty much any kind of art you can think of into one weekend, once every two years. I have been involved as a technical adviser for about 3 years now, and last year we went down to the tiny village of Glenmalure in County Wicklow and conjoured up a bit of Hippy Magic...
So as I gently ease my way into this pastime/hobby/way-of-life/thingy we call 'blogging', I have started doing a few things you may or may not find interesting, but which will kinda (I hope) help me make this whole blogging malarkey enjoyable for me, and for whoever reads lifewithouttoast.com.
1. I have begun the mammoth task of lashing a whole shitload of my pics up to Flickr. I had been Flickr-ing half-heartedly for a good while, but I have recently uploaded pics from my UK holiday last year, and will follow this with Attchoo! festival photos (more on that later), some nice panoramics (a few are up already), and general random crap.
2. I will try and add a few links to my sidebar in the 'del.icio.us lin.ks' bit, every day (the linkroll is missing at the moment, I'm working on that, in the meantime go to del.icio.us/matt_man). These links are all the stuff I find interesting/funny on the web. Read them, most if not all are good stuff.
3. Using the aforementioned Flickr.com, I hope to start 'moblogging'. This will probably start in March.
4. I will be making more (hopefully funny/cool/fascinating) videos and putting them on Google Video, so I can embed them in the blog. Some I hope will be more than 3 minutes long.
Anyhoo, for everyone who reads this blog (there's at LEAST 5 people who do), cheers, and I hope you enjoy it.
You know That Heineken 'Space Probe' ad, yeah? This one, I mean. Do you recognise the cunningly disguised plinky-plonk piano music at the end? It's "Bring It Back", by Moloko. Kinda like that Carlsberg Ad with Rod Stewart's "Da Ya Think I?m Sexy?" cunningly disguised as Chinese plinky-plonk music at the end, really. I wonder did they use the same marketing company...? Hmmm...
Maybe I'm watching too much TV.
...That somebody did the dishes.
(hint: it's not me)
Did anyone see the 10-minute 24 prequel/teaser last night?
Jack Bauer, in hiding, long, unwashed, unkempt hair, ripped hoody, dirty jeans, looking a hell of a lot like a poor wino, yet, unbelievably, driving a brand new shiny silver Toyota Avalon. Now if I were a law enforcement officer and saw someone who looked like monseur Bauer driving a motor like that, I'd be a mite suspicious. It's one thing to use product placement, it's quite another to make the story unrealistic for the sake of it.
He would have been much better off driving an old AMC Pacer or something. Well, I wouldn't have been distracted by it anyway.
So I got an email from my sister Rebecca last week:
"Our computer is f*cked. It's UNBELIEVABLY slow.. there is something seriously wrong with it. Any time you try to get it to do anything even open a document, it hangs and takes about 5 mins to open ... Do you think you could call out some evening and sort it out?"
So after going to see out new house again with Nikki yesterday morning and having coffee n' cake in Mugs in Dalkey (where Andy works) I drove across over to her house (an hour and a half away on the other side of county Dublin) yesterday at about 4pm and after tea n' a sambo, sat down and gave it a go. Took about 5 minutes to boot up. Hmmm. Windows XP, I don't remember them getting that. No programs installed that are particular memory hogs. Right. I see.
"Virtual Memory too low, Windows XP needs more memory. MOOOOORRE MEEMMMOOOORRYY!!!!" (or something like that)
Ctrl. Alt. Delete.
Physical Memory total: 89MB
Commit Charge total: 218MB
Well that clearly won't do, will it? I opened up the tower and there was one 64MB and one 32MB DIMM card. I've only been 'into computers' for a while and I had never even seen a 32MB DIMM before (in an actual computer I mean, I've seen them in pictures)! So I gave them the old 'WinXP into 96MB won't go' and a quick lesson in swopping RAM cards out and told them to give me a ring if that didn't work. I'm sure I'll be called out again within a week, but seeing as I kinda owe them a huge favour, it's cool.
I only noticed this place the other day, it's between my work and M&S foodhall here in Dun Laoghaire. It's an Imaginarium outlet, but look at the doors!! There's a normal one for grown-ups, and a teeny-tiny one just for kids.
I wanted to go through the little door but they wouldn't let me (even after I threw a tantrum and pounded on the ground and everything).
So the other day I was perusing Annie's blog and she was talking about the use of Yiddish in the present day. I commented that the Irish language is almost dead as a spoken language, she compared it to Catalan, etc, and it got me thinking. There are several ways that Irish still pervades the English spoken in Ireland, Irish words are used, conjunctions of words from Irish are used in English, etc. This reminded me of one morning on the Ray D'arcy Show when they were talking about the 'habitual or continuous present tense', or 'aimsir ghnáth-láithreach'. This is used everyday by Irish people, where instead of saying someone 'is' doing/something/somewhere, they say he/she/I 'does be' or 'do be', for example:
"He does be always down in the pub, where himself and the lads do be drinking pints all the feckin' time"
(or someting like that, also 'I do wake up every day' or 'I do go to work at ten')
This tense is used to describe something that happens habitually, every day or all the time. The use of 'does be' and 'do be' are still frowned upon/laughed at by those who are not aware that they are entirely correct as spoken by an Irish person, and it is something that has managed to stay in use despite it not being 'grammatically correct' or 'proper' (or God help us, 'the Queen's') English..
Now here's the thing. The word for 'tense' (as in present tense, past tense) in Irish is 'aimsir' (am-sher). Aimsir also means 'weather'. So when Irish people are talking about the past, present or future, conditional or continuous, anything we talk about, ever, we are always talking about the weather. Just go into a pub in Ireland sometime and you'll see how right I am.
4.21-en
Geek Support, fixing of bugger-ups, moral support, code splicing, tech. administration, whining, über-nerdery and fetching of fluffy coffees by 
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