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Being the slightly snobbish coffee aficionado that I am, I have a Gaggia espresso machine at home. Like almost all espresso machines, even the really, really expensive ones, it came with a shitty black plastic tamper, rather than something even slightly decent. If you know anything about coffee, you'll know that the quality of the espresso is dependent on several factors, like water pressure, evenness of grind, and perhaps most importantly, the tamping, ideally done with a tamp weighing approx 1/3 of a kilo, and made of stainless steel. So I got bored with drinking good, but not excellent coffee while at home, and I ordered an Espresso Tamper from the Gaggia UK website last night.
This is the confirmation page after placing the order:
Wouldn't it be great if you could send mails to people's phone numbers? Think of the spam though. Maybe not.
So I was cooking up a tasty stir-fry last night for myself and herself, and while I was peeling the garlic (LOADS of garlic), I came across the oddest thing. When I peeled the skin off one garlic clove, the clove was orange. It kinda looked like a segment of a mandarin/satsuma, and smelled kinda like the smell you get from a garlic capsule (you know, the ones that look like cod-liver-oil capsules). Click the image there for a larger view (the orange clove is the one that's orange...). All the other cloves, as you can see, are totally normal.
Anyhoo, it was fucking weird. So I had to take a photo, and blog it (obviously). Has anyone seen anything like this before? Or can anyone shed any light on why exactly one of my garlic cloves was fucking ORANGE?! Needless to say, it didn't go into the stir-fry.
Nice one dudes.
[#2 in a series of ∞]
[Where we talk mostly about Ebay and stuff]
17:16:16 Stuart: If you're going for a PS3 for April 29th
17:16:26 Stuart: this might be a good bet, as it's a misspelled listing
17:16:34 Stuart: [Ebay PS3 Link]
17:16:47 Stuart: and the starting price is 99c.
17:17:04 Stuart: not many people will look for a playstaion.
17:23:52 Stuart: Feel free to offer a fair amount if you like.
17:26:47 Stuart: You didn't see me, roight?
18:29:28 Matt: cheers!
18:30:07 Stuart: no problem!
18:31:30 Matt: bidding at ?51 now
18:32:14 Stuart: that looks fishy
18:32:26 Matt: fishy?
18:32:27 Stuart: three separate bidders with stars in the middles of their names?
18:32:42 Stuart: yeah the automatic bids that came up when you bid
18:32:43 Matt: true
18:32:58 Stuart: I have a love-hate relationship with eBay
18:33:02 Matt: me too
18:35:19 Stuart: I bought Guitar Hero 2 with a guitar for $22.50
18:35:24 Stuart: shipping....$25
18:35:31 Stuart: Which was fair enough, I thought.
18:35:38 Stuart: But it was a big corporate ebay-company
18:35:46 Stuart: with 140,000 feedback
18:35:52 Stuart: 96% reviews.
18:36:11 Stuart: and the 4% consisted entirely (as I saw after I'd paid) of people being upset about the guitar hero packs
18:36:31 Stuart: new guitars, secondhand, heavily-used, scratched discs
18:36:41 Stuart: happened to me too.
18:36:55 Stuart: I am very cautious now
18:37:13 Matt: brutal
18:37:46 Stuart: learning curve.
18:37:53 Matt: totally
Just a quick review this one. When I originally saw that the 'Rillaz were releasing another "b-sides" collection to accompany their Demon Days album (similar to 2002's G-Sides, released after their eponymous first album), I decided that I was going to buy it. Then I forgot to.
Then the other day, I was browsing through the iTunes Store on my iPod Touch (which was nice), and I saw it, and bought it immediately (actually my first ever iTunes Store purchase, believe it or not).
It's a much better effort that G-Sides, which contined only a couple of new tracks alongside a few remixes and additional tracks. D-Sides features, in the main, a pile of brand-new tracks and original versions that went on to become tracks on Demon Days, alongside some remixes, the Hot Chip remix of Kids With Guns being a standout track among them.
I'm not going to do a track-by-track analysis, I'll just say that I've been listening to it in the car and in work for the past couple or three days, and it's becoming a favourite. A bit like the way Demon Days took a few listens to warm up to, before becoming one of my all-time favourite albums, this is taking several listens to get into its' groove. My favourite track? It's gotta be Bill Murray.
[#1 in a series of ∞]
[@ 1.20am I Twittered]
01:22:37 Alexia: lol.... gotobed gotobed :-)
01:22:49 Matt: indeed
01:22:52 Matt: sriously
01:22:55 Matt: need to
01:23:01 Matt: but am not
01:23:04 Matt: why is this?
01:23:13 Alexia: you're a rebel
01:23:21 Alexia: you run of B5 eps ?
01:23:30 Matt: I'm a nucking futjob
01:23:35 Alexia: lol
01:23:37 Matt: no more B5
01:23:39 Matt: all gone
01:23:44 Alexia: oh dear
01:24:13 Matt: I have season 2 of Ghost In The Shell Standalone Complex on my Mac, but I'm too lazy to get round to actually watching it
01:24:29 Alexia: That's fucking lazy
That's "Cave Story" to you and me.
I discovered this little of an old-school side-scrolling gem of a 2d shoot-em-up while perusing my Destructoid feed last week. It's totally awesome. It's 100% free, but may require a little patching depending on what machine you're using. On my Mac, it required patching with a translation file, as my Japanese isn't so hot. All the Downloads and patches can be found here, along with details of characters, weapons and the like, and FAQs and Walkthroughs for those of you who suck ass.
I'm a couple or three levels in at the moment and it definitely reminds me a lot of games I played in the mid-90's, sort of between Metroid and Mega-Man, but cuter, smarter and with the benefit of hindsight and experience, better. The level design is awesome and the difficulty curve is bang-on (so far). It also looks cuter than it is, with the weapons getting pretty serious a couple of levels in. The physics of the jumping are also in tune with my inner 90's gamer, being nicely floaty on the jumping, with nice stickiness on landing with a lovely touch of Super Mario Land 2-style momentum.
Seriously, if this was released on the Wii Virtual Console I'd be paying my €8 and downloading it right now. Totally recommended.
In case you didn't know, some dude called Amplive remixed some tracks from Radioheads' In Rainbows and was all set to release them onto the Intertubes in December, but then received the inevitable "cease-and-desist" from the big R's lawyers, and pulled the whole thing.
Fortunately, they met up with each other since, and decided all that messing about with lawyers and crap was a load of old arse, and as of today the album Rainydayz Remixez is available as a free download, featuring contribitions from Too $hort, MC Zumbi of Zion I, Chali2na of Jurassic 5, Codany Holiday, and Del The Funky Homosapien (two of which I've actually heard of). Some of the tracks are alright. Some of them are really good. I suggest you have a listen.
We've been shortlisted for best group blog.
I didn't see that happening. I still don't harbour any illusions that we have the slightest hope of winning (indeed I see us as having the least chance on the list of winning), but still, nice to be short-listed.
I suppose I should probably put my name down to actually attend the awards really! Is anyone else going? We should totally sit together like, wearing our Fluffy badges.
DRRRRRRRIIIILLLLL!!!
That'll be putting up some shelves next week so. Or just like, drilling things. You know, like, for fun.
I went to see QOTSA last night in Dublin's teeny tiny Ambassador Theatre. I love that place purely because even if you are dead late (which we were) and you are far back, you are still not really all that far back. We moved to the front fairly quickly but bot before purchasing a lovely t-shirt which was only €8!!! I am assuming it was an end of line one as they only had size small ones left which suited me grand and the rest of the tee's were about €25, but I had gotten in for free so it was like a free t-shirt too in a way. 
Got me a Fluffy Badge.
I am now certain that my place amongst the Irish blogging elite is assured. Maybe.
I’m in the middle of moving the ‘Toast over to Moveable Type 4 (with the help of Adrian), and I just noticed that the system may have inadvertently posted all the entries again. Like, 400-ish of them. Well, they all appeared in my Google Reader anyway.
So, if you have a crap load of unread posts from here, don’t worry, we haven’t been posting like we’re on crack. Mark them all as read, and carry on as normal.
UPDATE:We had to re-import everything, again, so you may have gotten everything into your feed-reader, again, so mark them all as read, again, and pretend like nothing happened.
4.21-en
Geek Support, fixing of bugger-ups, moral support, code splicing, tech. administration, whining, über-nerdery and fetching of fluffy coffees by 
