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We've been nominated for the 2008 Irish Blog Awards in the category of "Best Group Blog". Thanks to whoever it may have been who voted for us, the cheque's in the post. :-)
I don't harbour any allusions that we might even make the shortlist, never mind win anything, as we're up against some very good blogs, but it's nice to be on the long-list.
There were two instances today where I felt like the most intelligent human ever (that doesn't happen very often!!)
1: I pulled out of the driveway in work, some gonk in a small car (almost as small as mine but with a 1L engine or less), they took the corner super wide and nearly took a group of people and a bus out of it. Then I looked up, an L driver. Now I have nothing about L drivers but it was the way that they had their L plate displayed. Upside down!! If someone cannot put an L plate onto their own vehicle so that it's readable by the general public, they shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel. Seriously, did they not look at thier handywork with the hatch back boot closed??
2: I went to Tesco to get some "messages" (as the aul wans say!) I decided to save time I would go to the self check out. BIG mistake! I don't understand how people do not know how to use them. Read the forking instructions you idiots! For a start the machines TALK to you, they also have lots of words explaining what to do written on the touch screen.
There were three people on front of me in the queue, three machines working and all of these were occupied. It took me 15 minutes of queuing to scan my two poxy items. Jasus wept! There was one woman, about 30 ish I would say, dressed like she had an important job, she obviously had no brain though unfortunatly. She asked for a plastic bag, the machine asked her (voice and words on screen) did she accept that she had to pay the bag tax. It said it CLEARLY on the screen, there were big massive YES and NO icons to touch on the screen, and she insisted on not looking at the screen and also trying to ram her fifty quid into the paper money receptical. Knobarama!!
Then the attendant came over, pressed yes, the Tesco lady ate her ?50 and then instead of listening to the electronic lady saying "Notes are dispensed below the scanner" she was looking UNDER the machine, on top of the machine, basically there could have been a giant flashing neon arrow pointing her in the direction of her change and she would have still been standing there looking bewildered. I actually wanted to kill her. I am not going in there again for a while. I just needed some spinnach for my dinner. :(
Everybody, meet George.
Isn't he gorgeous?
We picked him up from the Cats & Dogs home (in Rathfarnham) last Friday week, and he's settled in very well. He's house trained (thankfully), and his favourite activities are chasing things, sleeping, eating and spreading kitty litter all over the utility room floor (we're hoping he'll grow out of the last one). He also loves snuggling into his Mammy and Daddy on the couch of an evening.
We always had cats while I was growing up, but George is Nikki's first kitty, and she's loving it. He's also great around guests, and fell asleep last week when we had people around and we were all jumping around playing Wii Sports, so he's pretty cool really. In fact, he's very cool.
So as I am sure you all know by now I am a total techophobe. It's not that I don't want to know or understand, it's just that mostly people who I want to know stuff from talk about stuff at me (this is not their fault its just I go into a daze when people start talking about certain topics).
So help me someone. I got a new iPod, it's lovely and is black and shiny. It's just a normal iPod Video 30G from the US of A from Ebay yah? So I connected it to my lovely laptop and it was "syncing" or whatever (iPod furiously flashing at me to not disconnect) this took about 10 mins or so as it was getting all my music and that, so I just turned it on there and all my music is NOT on it. What is the deal with this. It's 30G and only has about 3G of stuff on it. I know I have more stuff than that as I checked it and my stuff is not on it. Weird no? As in basically on my Creative I had about 3000 songs or more, but on this I have 827, where is all my music gone to? Its still in "MUSIC" on my vista blah laptop so why did it not "sync" or whatever hmmm?!
In other "geek" news I discovered today that I have the typing speed of a legal secretary (rawk - I knew all of that frantic emailing was would be worth it in the end!!) but I do not "touch type using the correct home keys - whatever!) . I want to learn to touch type now, just to do. I think I will be able to do it. Currently I only use one of my fingers on my left hand and three from my right so if I am only using 4 fingers now and I start to use four from each hand that will therefore double my typing speed yah? I am also deadly on Excel, who would have thought that would ever happen? I hate Excel. It is the bane of my life and it hates me back as much as I hate it.
Anyway, I am off to bed, if anyone knows what is up with my iPod please help me!
I will give someone any exorbitant fee they require if they knit me this hat.
There's even a pattern of sorts available.
Or, you could just knit it for me because you are awesome, and so am I.
[H/T: BoingBoing; photie credit: TiddlyPeeps]
A few weeks ago after I discovered that someone in my office was stealing food from me I wrote a nice email to my boss saying that the problem needs to be dealt with blah blah without accusing anyone. Now I knew that it was him which is sort of why I sent it to him in the first place but there were no accusatory (is that a word) tone to the email, just that I was very unhappy about the situation and it needed to be sorted pronto :)
He admitted to it and it hasn't happened since, but since then he has turned into the total boss from hell. So today instead of working in the office with all of the rest of them (all three of them) who have no idea of the general code of conduct in an office (ie: if someone is on a phonecall don't say fuck really loud, don't talk really loud, don't talk to the person who is onthe phone to a client, don't give shit to someone who has no idea what they are supposed to be doing in one aspect of their job because no one has ever shown them etc) I moved to the office downstairs and worked away all day on my own, it was great, I got loads and loads done and it was basically a very productive day because no one was distracting me with inane bullshit that I don't want or need to know anything about.
...Or online in the Dell shop.
Now I know Matt hates Windows etc and so do many other people but I like it because I know how to use it and all that jazz and if there is one thing to know about me is that I like using things that I know how to use.
I got a new laptop - not from a second hand store...and I LOVE it.
It's a total beaut...Dell Inspiron 1525 with a Ruby Red exterior, I still call it Raspberry because it is that colour that stains your clothes and your fingers when you go to the end of my parents garden and gorge yourself from their raspberry bushes, yum, I can't wait till Summertime when I can do that once again.
So my new laptop is great, its fast, like about a million billion times faster than my old one mainly due to (or so I am told) the amount of memory on it, and it has built in wireless (which my old old oldey one didn't) and it has a bluetooth receptor or whatever it is called and its RED, it feels like silk to touch, amazingly nicer than my old crappy dull black rough one.
I am delighted with myself!
I am not however delighted with Dells telephone people. Yesterday when I was trying to get through to customer services to ask a very very simple question about my laptop which had not been delievered yet it took me 7 phone calls before I gave up trying in the end. I was disgusted to be honest. I called them SEVEN bloodywell times. I got through to numerous different departments, all in India I think, all of whom put me through to the wrong person even when I was promised that I wouldn't be and then they all eventually put me through to an automatic answering service thingy who told me that Dells opening hours were between 9 and 5.30pm and their offices were closed even though I was calling between 12.45pm and 1.45pm. I was almost in tears with the frustration.
Interlink - the courier company who delievered the laptop tp me were wonderful on the other hand and even called me twice to tell me where my package was, once to tell me that the driver was in the area and would be delivering withing the next hour and then again to tell me that the driver was just driving through the gates of where I work. I love them officially, but not as much as my laptop.
Ok, so I think you all get it now, I love the laptop, it loves me, I am scared of Vista though, but I will be ok in a while, at least I know how Windows works mostly!! :)
Everybody's (well every Mac user's anyway) favourite screenshot-snapping, annotating, uploading, hosting and embedding application Skitch is now out of private, invite-only beta and into full public beta.
If you have a Mac, and take screenshots in any part of your daily work (or out of work, for blogging n' shit), Skitch is indispensable. I've been using it for ages now, and it seriously improves the whole experience of screen-grabbing, getting rid of all the pain and actually making it a pleasurable experience, helped in no small part from the totally brilliant website, myskitch.com, which comes as part of the package. Watch the intro video to see how:
Scott McNulty from TUAW called it "the coolest thing I have seen at Macworld that isn't an iPhone", and he's right. It's awesome.
If you have a Mac (it's Mac-only), and you've ever taken a screenshot, you've no excuse. Download it right now.
Lyle has dropped me in the shit (for which he has been severely reprimanded) with this here meme thingy.
To quote from Lyle: "The idea of the meme is to list five things in your life now that you would have never thought would be in your life when you were 25". So here we go then (deep breath...).
Okay this one's fairly obvious. If anyone had told me this was going to happen 5 and a half years ago, I would've told them to fuck off. Thankfully, they would've been right.
Well, yeah. This one kinda came as a surprise to me as I was doing it. According to several male friends of mine, I've now "fucked it up completely for the rest of us". Hey, I can't help it if I rock this much. :-)
It had to happen sooner or later. I just thought it would be later, after I had traveled the world and stuff. Oh well, I guess the traveling of the world will have to wait until (a lot) later, after gardening and pets (I want some chickens) and other settley-downey things.
This is actually very surprising to me. I was a nerd when I was in my early teens, interested in the sciences, reading, and getting beaten up. Then I discovered smoking and drinking and... things. Then (more recently) I met Nikki and fell in love. Then I met Adrian, who is a friend of hers, and now a friend of mine. Adrian is an über geek of the highest order. I blame him for my love of gadgetry, for me learning how to code (badly), and most of all for my constant refreshing of Endgadget's reports of Macworld Keynotes and the like (MacBook Air anyone?).
Hey, if anybody told me that I'd have a blog when I was thirty (and a half), I would have gone to see the doctor immediately to see if anything could be done to prevent it (not because I didn't like blogs, but I didn't know what one was).
So there you go. Funny how life can surprise you isn't it? But if it didn't, wouldn't we all be like, SO bored?
I'm not really arsed tagging anybody. I can't tag Babs because she's only 24. So I'll tag the aforementioned Adrian, because I know he won't do it (and I bet a fiver he doesn't), and Dan, because he might do it, it's his kind of thing. Oh, and I might as well tag me big sis' Becca while I'm at it, as she hasn't posted in AGES.
*(I say "another" Five Things because I've already done a five things meme, but a different one!)
Yes, slidey slide, my little baby car Muriel or Heartbeat as she is known to some had a small accident last night, well, medium, on some bastarding black ice. I was driving along (in my automobile) in 2nd gear as the road was very sparkley and I knew it was super icy.
I was being careful, I was freaked anyway as I had skidded a few times already and then all of a sudden I was backwards on the road, the car spun 360, was straight for about a millisecond so calmed down a tad and then all of a sudden we were skidding down a hill sideways, I hit a kerb and turned backwards and smacked my head off the side window and then finally she stopped.
I thought I was going to die. It was the scariest thing that has ever ever happened to me. Skidding a little bit is scary enough but backwards and sideways down a road is freakishly scary. I was so scared and shaken that I couldn't get out of the car for about 5 minutes. I finally opened the door and assessed the damage in my frozen and shaken state. All lights working, no damage to the front, a hissing from a burst tyre, great!! The whole passenger side of the car was up against a wooden fence, that was broken, a big dent in my passenger side front panel and the small panel beside that, and the rest I couldn't see because it was pitch black and the car was against the fence. Panic panic, I dropped my phone three times before I got it together enough to make a phone call.
I rang Sean my brother in law, whimpering at him down the phone, "I crashed the car I crashed the car, its fucked, help me!!!". My head was killing me, I was shaking from either the cold or the shock or both. A girl who was driving behind my car had pulled in, she was holding me as I shook and cried and sniveled on her shoulder, she was my savior. I remember saying over and over "I broke my baby car, I broke my baby car". Sean came along fairly quickly and got me sorted, he doesn't feel the cold he said, he took off the burst tyre and replaced it with the spare, he pulled out the dent as much as he could. I didn't know what had happened. I was still shaking. The girl had gone at that stage.
The grass was crunchy. The road was twinkling at me. I was ok. No harm done to me. If something had been coming on the other side of the road I would have been dead, instantly gone. Black ice is a bastard. I have to get a new panel or two, I am amazed at the lack of damage. Thankfully I hit grass and a wooden fence, thankfully it was not a wall, or a car or something harder and thankfully I was going slow enough to not do any major damage.
What really killed me was that while Sean was doing the tyre people were speeding past us. How stupid are they, obviously there had been an accident, obviously the road was dangerously icy, obviously they should not have been speeding, but they were, I just hope that all of them got home safe. I was lucky. Someone was watching over me last night.
Adrian sent me a mail today. He's of the opinion (which I share) that Twitter is totally brilliant, and that everybody who blogs, and a few who don't, should totally be using it, since it's evolved from it's "what are you doing?" roots to become a lot more, namely a huge community of people talking to each other about all kinds of crap, asking for advice, sharing links, and generally it's a great resource for what's what in the world of the interpipes. and it's still that great "what are you doing?" thing too.
Adrian wants people like Dan (and a few others I'm sure) to start Twittering. Adrian uses Twitteriffic for posting his "tweets" when he's using his computer (as opposed to when he's out-and-about, where he texts them using his phone, like a lot of others). I used to use it too, but more recently it's changed from Freeware to Shareware, and I hate paying for stuff (especially stuff which used to be free) so I've started using Tweetr, on my Mac at home and my PC in work.
In his mail Adrian also requested I do some sort of how-to detailing how to install Tweetr on your PC and how to link your Tweets to your Facebook status and that sort of thing. Which is what you are now reading.
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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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