Life Without Toast - Sibling Rivalry

(Dedicated to Winds...)

Swim, swim, swim, swim, poo, eat, splash, splash, swim,
Tank: ?ooh I know I will try and get past this giant rock in the tank and get wedged there for hours until Babs gets home, oh here she comes woohoo?
Babs: ?you are a fucking idiot Tank?
Tank: ?oooh she set me free, I wonder will she give me any of that yummy dried river shrimp stuff, mmm mmm good?.
Swim, swim, swim.
Tank: ?I wish that these other turtles weren?t here, why does Babs feel the need to adopt other peoples turtles, these two here aren?t even the same, now I?m not being a racist or anything, but what the fuck is with their red ears, seriously!! Although the girl one is hot I suppose?
Splish splash,
Tank: ?oh lights out, lets try and piss Babs off when she is trying to sleep by beating the heads off one another, that will be great, maybe then she will feed us?..?.
Babs: ?Shut the FUCK up Jasus, what is wrong with you, Roomie* take your fucking small turtles back?,
Roomie: ?yeah I will, yeah, no problem, em, I will clean my tank out tomorrow? (**)
Splish splash, ZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Tank: ?Woohoo, lights on, food time, yay? ? plop-plop?plop-plop ? ?this fucking container she puts us in to feed us is shit isn?t it?
Roomie?s female turtle who has no name ***: ?oh you?re talking to me know, even though I have RED ears, fuck off yellowbelly?
Chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, plop-plop-plop-plop,
Tank: ?yay freedom in the tank, victory is mine, I am free apart from these four glass walls that keep me off the carpet?
Swim, swim, swim, splish, splash.
ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

(* Not my roomies real name)
(** He has been saying this since November)
(*** She has never had a name, aw!!)

Posted by Babs at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I was getting my clothes together for today yesterday (yes I do that every evening, it saves hassle but is a tad obsessive I will admit) and I decided I would count my tights collection, and I have 35 pairs, is this too much? I had more, but threw out about 10 last night, M & S are the best as they last forever, coming in at a close second are Penney's / Primark (and are cheaper) followed by Wolford ones, Top Shop ones are cack I think and always rip. Also, is it wierd that I think that "fleshtone" tights / stockings are just wrong? They look like saggy skin or REALLY shiny skin. Anyway, next time I am going to count my socks, yes, I am that bored sometimes. (shh!!)

Posted by Babs at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

One for the Geeks this one, although the non-geeks might as well give it a go:

I am: Isaac Asimov One of the most prolific writers in history, on any imaginable subject. Cared little for art but created lasting and memorable tales.

_{[via BoingBoing]}

Posted by Matt at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't know what the "average" is though...

Take the test!

Posted by Matt at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Photoblogging...

Ok, it's the view from the roof, but still.

Posted by Matt at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Me and Nikki ventured into the city last night to meet Tom, aka Dragon, for a pint or three. He's been working in Dublin for a couple of months, and when he announced that he was coming on his blog late last year I had suggested he stay with me for a bit, but that didn't happen in the end, so I had suggested via email that we meet for a pint. Things being as they are, it took until now for me to get my arse in gear and get around to doing it, in the last week that he's here.

It always surprises me (although it shouldn't really) that every time I have met someone in "real life" that I had previously only known from reading their blog or them commenting on my blog, that everyone in the little blogging community that I am part of are universally lovely people.

We talked about blogging, bloggers, babies, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 (all the b's!), all sorts of crap. We discussed how we were both at "Wolf 359 - The Alliance" in 1997, and how we both drank copious amounts of alcohol in the bar with Gareth Thomas throughout the weekend, but somehow never met each other (incidentally, Tom also met Pix at the same convention, which I thought was also interesting, I wonder how many other bloggers were there as well?).

We talked games! San Andreas (and "pimping" therein), WoW, online gaming, leaderboards, offline gaming, the Wii and how some bloke lost weight playing it, etc.

We talked work. That didn't last very long.

All in all, a lovely little night out with a lovely bloke (and my lovely missus, of course, who I am surprised wasn't geeked to death by most of the conversation), someone I will definitely look up next time I'm in Blighty. I only wish it hadn't been on a schoolnight and we could have had a bit more to drink! :-)

Posted by Matt at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

So I was sitting at my desk today in work and we received an email from the lovely Amy who is our Health & Safety Rep telling us all about the new canteen duty rota, we have a cleaner but the way that the canteen is left is totally manky and I feel so sorry for her to have to clean up after some of the dirtbags who work here, they leave coffee grounds and teabags in the sink (this I don?t understand?do they think that its going to set the bin on fire or something?) also plates with food on them, bowls with mouldy cereal encrusted on them and they NEVER put anything into the dishwasher, I think they should have a camera in there to catch the dirty culprits but my idea has been turned down for some reason (!!). Basically they have come up with this roster thing that we all have to stick to which means that we have to clean up the canteen after these individuals who feel the need to walk past the bin, then past the dishwasher, to leave their (unstacked) crockery on the draining board. They also seem to have some sort of mental issue with putting milk back into the fridge. Old milk + hot coffee / tea = dry wretching from me. Do you think they would give me a sick day for that, they should!! I am annoyed about this roster thing, I am planning to stage a protest of some sort about it, one good thing though, when I am on ?duty? I am on holidays, so they can stick their roster up their arse!

Posted by Babs at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Life Without Toast is officially ONE year old.

Cheers for reading, hopefully we'll maintain the stunning level of quality writing, reviewing, podcasting and err... "other things" evident in recent times for at least another few days month year or two.

Posted by at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

So, I was in St Vincents University Hospital (aka "Vincent's) today for a DEXA scan. Now, I had an appointment for 8.45, so I arrived at 8.45 with a newspaper in my hand and an iPod in my pocket, expecting an inordinately long wait, and to have to ring work to tell them I totally would NOT be in when I was supposed to be, at ten o'clock.

I was pleasantly surprised.

See, recently they built a whole new hospital at Vincent's. I had only ever been to the old one, with it's cramped, stuffy corridors, interminable waits for any kind of examination or service at all, and faint but definitely discernible smell of pee and/or puke. Now it's all different.

I entered into a huge, glass-walled, light-filled reception area, and went up to the reception desk where there was no, I repeat no queue. I asked the guy where I had to go. He had a list right in front of him with my name at the top of it (this is when I realised things might be radically different than before). He said it was the door on the right. There were lots of doors on the right.

"That door, right there?" I asked. He nodded. How convenient, I though.

I went in the door, and found myself in a waiting room. "Ah-HA!" I thought, "it's all an illusion, I really am going to be here for hours after all!" but the thought had only formed in my mind when a friendly Indian/Asian doctor lady walked in, asked me my name, and said they'd be ready in five minutes, and could I fill out this form thingy.

Five minutes later, I was lying on a bed in a hospital gown, getting my spine thoroughly scanned by a very fancy and modern-looking machine (I mean, it wasn't even powered by steam, which means the Irish Health Service is coming along in leaps and bounds) which beeped and moved around, and the bed moved up and down along with it. It took about twenty minutes for the scan, a quick chat with the Belgian scanner-operator lady and I was done. Back in the car, at work at 9.45.

NINE FORTY-FIVE! I was shocked, amazed, stunned. All of a sudden, we appear to have a health service in this country.

(actually, it was probably an isolated incident, and will never happen again)

Posted by Matt at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Photoblogging...

Je suis un oncle! This is baby Isobel Ellen Andrews, my first niece ever! And her mammy. We're all very emotional. :-)

Posted by Matt at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

It was last Thursday when this happened, but I have been busy and stuff?..

So I am coming out of the drive way of my office block, and there is a cross road beside me, I am turning right, it is a staggered crossroad, there is a car waiting to go from the road across from me, he has no indicator on, so I go, he obviously thought that I was telepathic or somehow knew that he wanted to turn the same way as me, but I didn?t, because he had no indicator on. So he is behind me, shaking his head and that, tut-tuting, I am thinking ?what an idiot? then as the traffic moved foreward the guy decides now is his chance to frighten the bejasus out of me, he drives up on the grass verge to the left of me so close that he clipped my wing mirror, and then starts to try and get on front of me, I am having none of it. In my head I am thinking ?I won?t let you beat me?. My friend was in the car on front of me, he was looking quite concerned at the situation. He tried to get on front but cut the car out on the process. So I drove around him. And then he went on the verge again and started to laugh insanely. I locked my doors. My friend in the car on front put on his hazard lights, I was thinking ?oh-oh?. My friend gets out of his car, walks to the insanely laughing mans car and knocks on the window. He asks what the guy is doing, and the guy just laughs in his face. My friend politely asks the insane guy to please stop trying to ram his friend?s car, and walks away. I think ?ok maybe now we can move forward? but he did it again!!!!!!! So I let him go, not without taking his reg number though. I don?t know if I am allowed to post it here, so I won?t. But he had no NCT, no tax or no insurance. So if I am feeling like fucking someone over someday, it will be him. And not without due cause??.

Posted by Babs at 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Is it just me being really pernickety or do other people hate this too. A lot of my friends who would be somewhat pretentious but who like to be seen to be ?keeping it real? have decided to turn their backs on their roots and to start using words that I would consider to be predominantly American such as ?awesome? and also ?Mom? or ?Mommy?. I can?t even handle the ?mum? thing. Most Irish people do NOT call their mothers ?Mummy? or ?Mommy? so why then when they hit fifteen does the ?Mam? turn into ?Mum? or ?Mom?. I think that its peer pressure, using words like these make people appear to be more refined (or so they think). It?s a farce as well cause when they are actually speaking to their mother they will call her ?Mam? but then to their apparently ?cool as fuck? mates its ?oh my Mum / Mom says blah blah? how sad and needy are these people? I can make exceptions when the mother in question is ACTUALLY from somewhere that uses ?Mum? as the word for mother but other than that it?s terrible. Also back to this ?awesome? thing, when did Irish people start top use this word, seriously, its getting to be beyond a joke, people who I thought were not so easily influenced actually are!! Its like some sort of a phenomenon (or something!) Anyway it?s really annoying. So I say ?Say NO to Awesomers!!!?

Posted by Babs at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

There's an article on Livescience.com about Self-Cleaning Underpants made of fabric coated with "nano-particles". Then, "chemicals that can repel water, oil and bacteria are directly bound to the nanoparticles. These two elements combine to create a protective coating on the fibers of the material."

"The technology, created by scientists working for the U.S. Air Force, has already been used to create t-shirts and underwear that can be worn hygenically for weeks without washing."

I have to have them. I NEED them. Seriously.

There's other links in the article about chameleonic clothing and spray-on shirts too. I'm not sure about the spray-on stuff, but a chameleon shirt would be cool.

Posted by Matt at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (0)

Photoblogging...

Posted by Matt at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

GEEK ALERT: This post is very, very geeky. Non-geeks should probably give it a miss.

I started using Google Reader about a month ago. I was using Sage before that, which is a more lightweight reader, an extension for Firefox, and while it was fine while I used it, I gave Google's offering a try and now there's no going back.

For a start, it looks and operates in a very similar way to Gmail, with an AJAX-ey interface which updates in realtime, so I never have to hit that "refresh" button to see who's posted something new. It's got a lovely "mark all as read" button too, which is nice for when a news blog has posted a hundred things since I checked and I couldn't be bothered reading them all.

You can "star" posts you want to check back on, similar to the "starred" mails thingy in Gmail, which is great. You can also share posts publicly, and very easily, by clicking the "share" button (my shared feeds are here, just in case you want to have a look). There's a function to enable a del.icio.us-like "linkroll" too, but I'm very happy with the one I have now, so for the moment I won't be using that. Still, very cool.

One other very, very cool thing is that if you put the feed for a podcast into the reader, when you look at the resulting feed it looks like this:

So there you have it. I thoroughly recommend Google Reader for all your feed-management needs, and seeing as it's part of "Google Labs", and therefore experimental (not even "Beta" yet), it can only get much, much better. Give it a go.

Posted by Matt at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Nat's only gone and bollocking tagged me (that's two tags in two days, a new record!) with the random book meme thing, which goes something like this:

1. Take the nearest book and go to page 123.


2. Go to the fifth sentence of the page.


3. Copy down the next three sentences and tag three people.

Nat has also taken the liberty of adding additional rules about doing it in work and asking whether or not you knew what's written on the page you find.

SO! I turned around at my desk and the first book saw was "Sound For Theatres" by Graham Walne, page 123 of which is almost entirely made up of pictures, and which has only three sentences. Dang. I tried again, picking up the second book there, "The Lost Theatres Of Dublin" by Philip B Ryan, which I have perused before on more than one occasion. Page 123 is about The Queen's Theatre, which was demolished in 1969.

"We know what Mr. Lucas means, he elevates Leno to the status of a serious artist, but we don't know what it was like to experience his artistry. George Bernard Shaw admired Marie Lloyd, but often wondered why someone didn't write humorous songs for her. Her songs, according to GBS, were very funnily sung but were not in themselves particularly funny.

I have to admit, apart from "George Bernard Shaw", I haven't a notion who's being talked about here. Marie Lloyd? A quick glance at the Wiki-wiki-wah gives me some insight. Interesting.

I'm not tagging anyone this time. If you really, really want to do this one, go crazy.

Posted by Matt at 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dragon has only gone and tagged me (the bugger). So here's five things you don't know (or might not know) about me:

1. I lived with my parents until I was 25 (yes, that's twenty-five).
2. I have never been to America.
3. I was once a door-to-door salesman for Granton/Ds-Max (and hated it immensely).
4. My favourite food is sandwiches.
5. I have absolutely no irrational fears or phobias about anything at all (feel free to challenge me on this one).

This is me, tagging Annie, Ian and Sharky. Tell us what we don't know dudes.

Posted by Matt at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (24) | TrackBacks (0)

Me and Nikki went to London for New Years. We didn't do much apart from eating LOTS of amazing Italian food, courtesy of our friend Lauras' ex-chef Dad, drink lots of home-made wine, chill and sleep, however, amongst the highlights were:

• Going to the Science museum (but leaving because it was WAY too hot in there).
• Going for lunch in Reigate.
• Going to Covent Garden (we *heart* Covent Garden).
• Getting totally fucking soaked in a sudden downpour and not really caring.
• Eating 12 grapes, one for every "bong" of Big Ben at midnight on New Years Eve/Day (and watching grapes come out of Nikki's nose due to extreme amounts of hilarity ensuing).
• Learning how to play Briscola (badly).
• Meeting Dan, Nat and Ian for late lunch/early dinner on New Years Day (and watching Dan drink five Virgin Marys in 30 minutes without puking).
• Meeting Adrian for lunch in Richmond (near where he works in eBay).

I won't harp on about how completely SHITE Ryanair have become, and how even their own staff are complaining about their ?8/kilo excess baggage charge, but suffice to say that after our trip to Oslo in March (which is already booked), we will never travel with them again.

Unfortunately, due to several silly circumstances, we didn't meet up with Annie, which is a real, real pity as she is so lovely and we really wanted to see her while we were there. Oh well, next time, ok Annie?

Happy New Year everybody!

Posted by Matt at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)