Desultory Ruminations

Dodo Flu

2009-08-14T12:55:00.004+01:00

The swine flu pandemic is certainly something that is on people's minds these days. There has been a lot of hysteria in certain parts of the word and I find it hard to tell if it's completely justified or not. Obviously, people are dying from this virus which is a terribly unfortunate thing, but I'm not sure if it is as serious as is claimed. Certainly, conflicting opinions on the matter from "experts" don't help. Some say it's a new super-strain for which vaccines will become futile while cynics liken it to the SARS and bird flu outbreaks which just seemed to eventually go away.

In all the talk about prevention of swine flu, the issue of personal hygiene has reared its head. Many places I've gone (at least within Dublin and London) have signs informing people how to blow their noses and sneeze properly i.e. use a tissue and dispose of it immediately afterwards. Common knowledge? Maybe not.

The latest aid to facilitate personal hygiene throughout my university, and probably other places, are dispensers of hand cleaning gel. I've seen them in my school, the accommodation building and the gym amongst other places. This is all well and good, but my concern - and I'm almost certain this will happen - is that once these dispensers run out they will not be replaced/refilled. I think it's a case of short-sightedness whereby authorities think they must be seen to be doing something so they've installed these dispensers, not thinking that they'll empty quite quickly and will have to be indefinitely replaced. Unless the goal is to get people into the habit of regularly cleaning their hands and that eventually, even without the dispensers, they'll do it automatically, I believe this will just be another knee jerk reaction.

Similarly to the time I found an iodine tablet in my drawer at home that was issued in the post 9/11 frenzy and fear of a terrorist attack on Selafield, I envisage a situation in a few years where people are walking around and they see these brackets everywhere on the walls - possibly still holding the empty gel dispensers - and a conversation ensues:

"What's this thing there for?"
"Oh, remember back in 2009 when everyone got in a big kerfuffle about that swine flu thing and they installed these everywhere so people would wash their hands?"
"Oh yeah, what ever happened to swine flu anyways?".
"Went the way of the dodo seemingly."
"I hear he died of swine flu."

I hope I'm right :-)

Ticketmecca

2009-07-03T09:57:00.002+01:00

I was ordering tickets for a gig on Ticketma$ter this morning. As usual, I was presented with a captcha (wikipedia entry if you don't know) as a security measure before I could proceed. I couldn't decipher the first one, so I clicked to get another and was presented with the words "Islamic aircraft". I thought it was an interesting collocation anyways...

Sepp Blabber

2009-06-29T14:43:00.004+01:00

FIFA president Sepp Blatter is not happy at the the influx of foreign footballing talent to England and at the amount of money being spent on these transfers by English football clubs.

The two most expensive transfers in England since the end of the season (as of writing) were €21 million to transfer a player between two English clubs and €13 million to transfer an English player between two English clubs.

Real Madrid (which is in Spain, of course) just spent approximately €165 million on two players, one of whom was bought, incidentally, from an English club.

Fool.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

2009-05-28T17:47:00.004+01:00

I don't really speak German. I have a few words here and there. When I've been in German speaking countries I've successfully employed pleasantries and asked the odd question (although I've not always understood the response). This is beyond the point, however. I...I've forgotten where I was going with this blog post.

*UPDATE 14/08/09*
As yes, I remember now! It was going to be something to do with how phrase books are pretty useless because obviously when you ask a question in the native tongue, the response is generally in the same. And you haven't the foggiest what is being said! Phrase books try to counteract this by providing a list of 'possible replies' but that's really useless, particularly if your asking something specific like a train time, platform number or something like that. The best thing to do is learn how do say "Do you speak English?" in their language or get them to write something specific down. Pointing helps too. To this effect, I find this book particularly helpful: http://www.amazon.com/Point-Travellers-Language-Dieter-Graf/dp/3980313026

A return to form

2009-05-11T11:41:00.002+01:00

Yogi Bear covers MIA

All I wanna do is *boom* *boom* *boom* *boom* and a *click* *ching* and eat your honey.

Good things come...

2008-11-11T17:44:00.004Z

As much I would like to be like Bill Bryson, what with the travelling and writing about it and that actually being a profession, I have no such luck. So the writing has to be done in my spare time which is paltry these days.

Having recently been to Hawai'i I had fully intended on comprehensively documenting by experience, especially considering that, despite it being the 22nd, it was the first nation I'd visited outside of Europe. I still have quite a few observations to make and have noted the jist of what I care to divulge elsewhere, but it's just going to have to wait. Hopefully not too long. I may break it down into more manageable chunks and release it slowly but surely, like a good...

Stay tuned.

Football is a matter of life and death

2008-09-15T18:57:00.006+01:00

I'm slightly disturbed at football's ability to affect my mood for significant periods of time. I'm a Liverpool supporter, and on days when Liverpool play and win I tend to have a nice day -- like waking up on the right (read correct) side of the bed. But when Liverpool lose it's quite the inverse -- I'm pretty moody and irritable. This can be brought to extremes, for example, depending on the magnitude of the match. When Liverpool lost in the Champion's League final in 2007, I sobbed uncontrollably in a bar in Valencia and had to be consoled by a number of people, included concerned strangers (I swear I wasn't drunk :-|). That being said, I wouldn't change it for anything. I love it enough that I'm willing to take the rough with the smooth.

Being a Liverpool supporter, I loath Manchester United. So much so that when they lose I feel nearly as good as when Liverpool win. I bring Schadenfreude to a whole new level. And then they win, it doesn't feel terrible but it's not nice. I guess it's probably analogous to losing €20.

So as you can imagine, when Liverpool play Manchester United, the shit well and truly hits the fan. This biennial occasion came around once again last Saturday. Liverpool hadn't beaten them in over 2.5 years, so a win was long overdue. The result you ask? 60 hours later and you still can't wipe the smile off my face :D

"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that." -- Bill Shankley

A (driving) lesson learned

2008-09-08T16:37:00.006+01:00

My driving instructor texted me at 2pm to tell me he couldn't make our lesson at 2.30pm because he was having "trouble with the car".

My driving instructor informed me during my last lesson that he didn't feel great so he was going to cancel the rest of his lessons for the day. Such are the perks of being self-employed, he noted.

My driving instructor is no longer my driving instructor.

Review or not review, that is the question

2008-09-04T20:31:00.010+01:00

As you may or may not know, I am a PhD student. This involves carrying out research and, when you have some interesting findings, writing papers. These papers are submitted to conferences with a view to having them published and presenting the work to your peers.

Most if not all of these conferences have a reviewing process in which relevant experienced researchers in the field form a programme committee. They then anonymously review the submitted papers and either recommend a given paper to be accepted or rejected. Normally, a review consists of a mark from 1-5 on a number of criteria such as "Technical Correctness", "Novelty", "Significance" etc. followed by specific comments from the reviewer justifying their decision.

I recently submitted two papers to a conference and a workshop and both were rejected. Far from being bitter, I understand not everyone's papers can be accepted. What I am extremely unhappy about, however, is the quality of the reviews I received.

In general, the comments in these reviews summarise the paper and highlight specific issues the reviewer had. My gripe is with the lack of consistency in this process across different reviewers and conferences. In my opinion, if a reviewer is going to reject a paper from the conference, the review should contain everything the paper needs to change/include -- in the reviewer's expert opinion -- in order to reach the publication standard. The idea behind this is that the researcher who has had their work rejected can take these comments on board, improve their paper and resubmit it to another conference down the line. The papers I had rejected lacked anything remotely approaching this.

One review was only about five lines long and did nothing but repeat my conclusions. The other reviewer obviously had some sort of personal gripe with my approach and borderline insulted me in his comments. Firstly, I only got two reviews and this was a large international conference. If I am going to spend months doing work and decide to submit it to your conference, the least you can do is oblige me with 3 reviews as is standard for conferences of this size. But more importantly, or frustratingly, there was absolutely nothing constructive I could take from the reviews to incorporate into my paper. So I'm left with a paper that was rejected by supposed experts and I'm none the wiser and to what to do with it so that it's not rejected the next time I submit it somewhere.

I understand the reviewing is a time consuming process, especially for larger conferences, but there really needs to be some sort of quality control. I'm not suggesting a review of the reviews or anything preposterous like that (although I am aware of some instances of programme chairs returning reviews to reviewers asking them for more substantial and useful reviews) but I think there are certainly some measures than can be taken.

Rather than present the reviewer with an unrestricted box in which to place comments, they could be more directed. If they are going to accept a paper, they can be asked to leave specific comments as to how the final paper can be improved. More importantly still, if they are going to reject a paper they should be asked to explain exactly what the paper needs to be brought up to standard. It's the least the person who submitted the paper deserves. Also, the 1-5 system of marking specific criteria can be improved. If as a reviewer you give a mark of 3 for "Clarity" you should have to explain why it wasn't a 5 -- what was unclear and how can you make it clearer. Why wouldn't you anyway? Laziness? Lack of motivation? If you don't really want to review, don't agree to be on the programme committee. It's a responsibility, not just another item to add to the "Professional Activites" section on your website/CV.

Another interesting approach is currently being adopted by one of the major conferences in my field. That is, the work is reviewed and returned to the submitter. They then have a few days to take on board the comments and resubmit the paper to the same reviewers who then decide whether the relevant changes have brought the paper to acceptable standard. This level of interaction between the reviews and the submitter is very beneficial. It will only lead to a higher quality conference proceedings and, for those who had work rejected, a justified rejection with the consolation of a clearer picture as to how to proceed. This all make take a little more time and effort on everyone's part but that shouldn't be an issue. The issue should be the betterment of the quality of research carried out on the field.

Now you may see these as the views of a young naive researcher who has yet to become disillusioned with the whole process, but I challenge you tell me something about my suggestions that wouldn't benefit anybody.

Everything is Great

2008-09-03T19:06:00.005+01:00

Well, it's been a while... (this is how my last post began also)

My friend Dónall -- who you may remember from such blog posts as Dónallism and Sweeping statement of the century -- tells me that I moan a lot. He used this very blog as a case in point. We looked back through my previous 22 posts and it seems as though I was voicing my displeasure (moaning) about something or other in 11 of them. So the purpose of this post is to tilt the scale in favour of the non-moaning posts.

So let me not moan about a few things:

The weather in Spain was lovely when I was there on holidays
I'm going to Hawai'i in October
We may not have great summers in Ireland but at least the winters are mild
I got a nice new pair of DC Shoes
...
...arghhh...
...aaarrgghh...*incredible hulk moment*...*inner monster escapes*...ah who am I kidding
It was too bloody hot in Spain
What a SHIT summer we've had here and now more of the same 'til next April
My reviews for AMTA in Hawai'i were really crappy and I should have had 2 more papers at it (more on this in an upcoming post)
It's really hard to work when next door is a fucking construction site, the dust from which is dirtying my nice new DC Shoes

WOE IS ME

52:48

God save the... tripe

2008-06-21T12:40:00.005+01:00

Wow - it's been a while. Here's something I read that really irked me.

On the BBC Sports website there is a feature -- about the European football championships -- whos headline reads:
Is Europe pining for absent England?

The sub-headline is:
It's a shame England aren't here

They don't mean from a sporting perspective. They seem to believe all the other supporters and locals are missing the English fan's presence! I don't even really want to start cos I could just go on and on and on. This is pretty typical of the BBC and it's not the first time I've posted something to this effect.

Shall I tell them the answer is "no" or do you want to?

The Fair City

2008-03-19T10:46:00.006Z

What the fuck is wrong with Dublin?!

Murder inquiry into Blanchardstown death

Tourist loses finger on St Patrick's Day

St Patrick's Day violence in Finglas

Welcome to Battlefield Drive, where drunken louts run riot

Pipebomb discovered in Dublin suburb

Two held over O'Connell St Incident

Taoiseach appeals over Drimnagh killings

Fatal stabbings doubled in 2007

Dónallism

2008-03-11T16:56:00.001Z

Dónall and I were in Luxembourg and he told some people there rather matter-of-factly that Ireland was quite a small country.

Oh should I?

2008-03-07T12:15:00.003Z

Should have gone to SpecSavers

This is the advertising slogan of the opticians SpecSavers. I do goto SpecSavers. I got my last prescription, pair of glasses and box of contacts there. So when I needed new contacts, I went back.
I went to the Grafton St. branch of a Thursday evening and asked for a new box. They asked me if I had my prescription with them and I said I had. So the lady proceeded to a massive filing cabinet (!!) to look for my prescription. I informed her that she probably wouldn't find it in there as I got my prescription in the Henry St. She then told me that she wouldn't be able to give me new contacts because the Henry St. branch was closed and she couldn't call them to have them fax me over a copy of my prescription. I asked her could she not look it up on their system and she said they don't have a system! They only have physical copies of patient/customer details!!! How fucking archaic is that?! As I believe it's optician's policy not to give lenses without a prescription even though I clearly have been there before, I had my prescription in the form of the box from my previous set of lenses (bog standard disposable ones), I left empty handed. I went to this branch because it was open late. Apparently the Henry St. one never opens late which I guess leaves me in a bit of a pickle.

So to SpecSavers I say 1) stop living in the long long ago and get yourself some sort of electronic customer database and 2) alter your misleading advertising slogan. I leave a suggestion below.

Should have gone to SpecSavers*

*but once you go make sure you always go back to the same branch

Sweeping statement of the century

2008-03-06T14:33:00.002Z

By a friend of mine over lunch while discussing the progress of their research masters degree:

I quite like academia, it's not too challenging

Snap unhappy

2008-01-24T12:19:00.000Z

I had an Olympus-SP130 that I wasn't too happy with. My main sticking point was that it ran on AA batteries, and it ate them alive. I'd be lucky to get an hour out of two Duracell before the LCD would go off and it was very frustrating at times. So the day I accidentally cracked the screen I saw the chance to get a new camera and resolve all the issues I had with the Olympus. After much research I eventually settled on the FUJIFILM FinePix Z100 fd.

It seemed to be the answer. It had a proprietary battery and charger with long lifetime, it wasn't as clunky as the Olympus, it was easier to use and of course it used 900,000 more pixels. After wading through all these bells and whistles, it was much to my dismay that when I took some photos using the highest image quality setting, the quality didn't compare to that of the Olympus on a moderate settings. The images weren't as sharp. There's a lot more purple fringing, especially with low light shots and in general the pictures were slightly noisy.

Now I'm aware that one gets what one pays for, but this camera was around €250 (i.e. not dirt cheap), came from the same range as the Olympus (i.e. subcompact) and used more of the almighty megapixels. This, I believed, was how to gauge the capabilities of a camera from the outside but it appears I was wrong. Now I'm far from an expert in digital imagery and all that goes with it, but it's apparent that the marketing folk in the camera industry have decided to latch on the "megapixel" as the proponent of the camera that serves as its ultimate benchmark, when I suspect that this is not the case.

To the untrained, if Camera A from Brand A costs €350 and proclaims 8 megapixels, and Camera B from Brand B costs €335 and proclaims 7.1 megapixels then it would be forgiven of them to immediately nab Camera A. How disappointed would they be if they found out Camera B was actually better at the bread and butter?

So in my opinion I feel I've been duped. You may say it's my own fault and it probably is but I think I only fell for what the majority of casual camera buyers fall for also. I also should have known better. In areas in which I command greater expertise, for example computing, I know to look past the bullshit to what really matters when buying, say, a new graphics card. I think I attempted to employ this tactic when I bought my camera but obviously I failed miserably!

Maybe someone more knowledgeable could give me the actual low-down?

The infinite Wii loop

2008-01-23T14:25:00.000Z

Some time ago I got myself a Nintendo Wii and, given my new wireless capabilities at home, went to configure the internet settings. Unfortunately I have to go through a proxy server in order to connect to anything, but normally it's not a problem, at least to begin with.

So I went through the settings on the Wii but was never given the choice to connect via a proxy, so of course I couldn't get online. I looked through the intertubes to see what the deal was and it seemed that the Wii does give the user the option to connect via a proxy. Upon further investigation I saw that this option doesn't appear unless you have Wii update X.X.

In order to get this update I had to connect my Wii to the internet and download it. So I went through the settings on the Wii but was never given the choice to connect via a proxy, so of course I couldn't get online. I looked through the intertubes to see what the deal was and it seemed that the Wii does give the user the option to connect via a proxy. Upon further investigation I saw that this option doesn't appear unless you have Wii update X.X.

In order to get this update I had to connect my Wii to the internet and download it. So I went through the settings on the Wii but was never given the choice to connect via a proxy, so of course I couldn't get online. I looked through the intertubes to see what the deal was and it seemed that the Wii does give the user the option to connect via a proxy. Upon further investigation I saw that this option doesn't appear unless you have Wii update X.X.

In order to get this update I had to connect my Wii to the internet and download it. So I went through the settings on the Wii but was never given the choice to connect via a proxy, so of course I couldn't get online. I looked through the intertubes to see what the deal was and it seemed that the Wii does give the user the option to connect via a proxy. Upon further investigation I saw that this option doesn't appear unless you have Wii update X.X.

...stupid

Unix 'rm' command

2008-01-22T14:11:00.001Z

I feel that the Unix 'rm' command should come with a warning label. Something like:

Warning: Improper use of this command may seriously damage your health. If you are unsure of the correct usage, have heart problems or are pregnant please consult the man page or, alternatively, your sysadmin.

Now to see when my last backup was and to train my fingers never to type 'rm *' again...

xkcd - xtremely krappy...nevermind

2008-01-21T13:38:00.000Z

Update: Seems as though I am not alone in this

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17346&p=488825&hilit=store#p488825
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16825&p=466072&hilit=store#p466072
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16266&p=443038&hilit=store#p443038

Happy New Year, time for a new post. Flaming time again I believe.

Back in November I decided I wanted to buy a nerdy t-shirt from xkcd, which for those of you who don't know, is a relatively popular webcomic/blog/online shop. They had a notice in their store citing a date by which orders must be placed in order to guarantee delivery before Christmas. Wanting my t-shirt before Christmas I placed my order on November 13th i.e. prior to the aforementioned date. About a month later I mailed the guy to check on the order and he replied:

I'm afraid we are not currently equiped to track international orders.

-davean

Fair enough, still a week or so until Christmas...but sure enough Christmas passed, the new year rang in and still no t-shirt. I mailed the guy again but he didn't reply. A week after that I mailed once more and the fucker continued to ignore my mails. So ultimately I decided to open a dispute on PayPal. I'd done this once before with success so I thought why not. I'm not letting this little prick have my €30 without an e-fight. However, much to my chagrin, PayPal's dispute resolution policy states that the complaint must be made with 45 days of payment. Bollox.

So I guess he wins. I lose. I'm not particularly bothered about not having the t-shirt or losing €30, I'm well aware of the risks of so-called e-commerce. But hopefully someone will read this and decide against buying a t-shirt from this pendejo.

Getting there...

2007-12-22T21:22:00.001Z

I think Dublin Bus is actually improving...

Random Musings

2007-10-30T12:03:00.000Z

It's been a while, so true to the title of my blog, I shall leave some notions that have swirled around my head recently:

Blackpool is certainly not the most aesthetically pleasing place in the world
Bedsitting accommodation is quite nasty
Dublin is rather more pleasant this autumn than it was all spring/summer
Tennis hurts my untrained gluteus maximus
Aer Lingus is quite luxurious compared to RyanAir
OpenOffice is a good (free) alternative to Microsoft Word in Windows, if that's your thing
It annoyed me more than I would have imagined when there were no more bottles for the water cooler
I love my The Box

I Couldn't Resist

2007-09-24T16:26:00.000+01:00

So apparently Apple have come up with a state-of-the-art regular expression generator. It uses the Mac's flawless automatic speech recogniser along with it's incomparable AI engine, to take a user's request and output the required regular expression.

Example of system functionality:

User (speech) input: "Hey Mac, can you give me a regular expression to solve all of life's problems please?"

System Output: s/(Windows|Linux)/Mac/g

Flaming Time

2007-09-22T22:21:00.000+01:00

Last Wednesday, the 19th, I ordered a Gibson SG Special electric guitar online from a site called iMuso. I did all the usual form filling on the site, forked out my €700 and started to look forward to the arrival of the beautiful machine. The next day I went to the site to track my delivery but it couldn't be found. I thought nothing of it. The next afternoon, I checked my bank account and the money had been charged to my credit card. So I checked the tracking page again but my order still couldn't be found. I felt a bit sketchy so I emailed the customer service on the site, and a few hours later they nonchalantly replied, we no longer ship outside of the UK, you'll be refunded any day. !!!!!!!

Naturally I replied, were you ever fucking planning on telling me?!?!?! Of course, I've had no reply since and I haven't been refunded. I do expect to be refunded at some stage, but I can't believe the gall of those guys. I wonder were they actually going to tell me they didn't ship to Ireland? They had no problem letting the transaction go through. Only when I questioned them, 2 days later, did they inform me.

So, BE WARNED, iMuso.co.uk are unreliable, dodgy feckers. Don't shop with them. Booooo to them. Give me my money back.

Shower Time

2007-09-04T01:10:00.000+01:00

I feel so dirty. I've just been knocking about my place doing bits and bobs with some music on in the background. I'd stuck my entire collection on shuffle (party shuffle for the iTunes savvy folk) and the music played away un-intrudingly. Then all of a sudden, I started noticing the song that was currently playing, it sent shivers down my spine. It was horrible, nasty. I listened on wondering what it could possibly be. I continued to be aurally violated for another minute or so, my stomach began to turn. Droplets of blood seeped from my ears. Then I looked. It was Damien Rice.

The XBBC

2007-08-14T16:49:00.001+01:00

I saw something recently on TV, on two separate occasions, that really got my ire up. The channels and programs in question are Match of the Day 1 & 2 on BBC 1 & 2 respectively.

For those of you not aware, both shows show highlights of English football matches and interviews with players/coaches followed by studio analysis from a panel of presenters and ex-footballers. A large number of the players and coaches in English are foreign, yet many of the grant interviews, to be done through English, to the aforementioned TV channels.

This is commendable as some of them don't speak great English yet are still willing to do these interviews. What I could not believe was that after two interviews, one on each of the shows, the first comment upon returning to the studio was a joke about the mispronunciation/misuse of English by the interviewee, which was greeted by a round of chortles by the all-Anglo panel!!!

That they actually had the gaul to make fun of these people on national television is beyond me. Not only that but the shows aren't live, so they had sufficient opportunity to edit out this xenophobic drivel.

This is typical of the grandiose contemptuous attitude attributable to some sections of the British/English media and quite frankly it makes me nauseous. I wonder how many of the idiots sitting on those panels can even muster a word of any language besides their own? I know for a fact that one of the players who made a mistake (he pronounced "titles" as tit-els instead of tite-els) is proficient in at least English and German as well as being a native Spanish speaker. Yet when he's brave enough to speak on British TV, he's derided for it!

Should I have expected anything better from the Xenophobic British Broadcasting Corporation? All involved should be ashamed.

Romabout

2007-07-26T12:02:00.000+01:00

The Roma have all left the roundabout (albeit at the behest of the authorities). I'd better call my architects and tell them to stop drawing up those plans, it was clearly just a fad.

Housing Development Gone Mad

2007-07-18T11:22:00.000+01:00

Unintentionally funny story on the RTÉ website. It's not the content of the article itself, but rather its RSS feed description that tickles my funny bone

A family of Romas [sic] who are living on the M50 roundabout in Ballymun have been subjected to racist attacks and slurs.

Imagine:
John Tinsley
12 Red Cow Roundabout Close,
Dublin 22.

It'd be awful trouble trying to back out of your drive-in...

Tourists? Here? Nahhhh

2007-07-18T10:07:00.000+01:00

I was in Valencia for a little while over the last week, and on the Saturday my girlfriend and I decided to take a day trip to Castellón, a small city about an hours train journey north. I had a mini-itinerary which basically consistited of the names of a few places to visit which I would locate upon obtaining a map at the tourist office and possibly asking a few questions of them. I itended to find my way to the tourist office by means of a photo of a map of the city I took at the train station (I already knew the address). So we trundled off and arrived at the office 20 minutes later at approx. 14:10 and alas it was shut. I'd half expected this as it was siesta time and the city was practically deserted on the walk there. So we looked for a timetable in the window to see what time it would reopen and were horrified to find that it wasn't to reopen again until 10am Monday morning!!

Ok, I understand that many public services only operate in the morning in Spain during August, but this was mid-July. Surely close to, if not the high-season for tourism in the area, especially considering the massive Festival Internacional de Benicàssim was just around the corner and takes place a tiny bit further up the road. Regardless of this, when are tourists most likely to visit this place? Especially on day trips? Tuesday at 21:30 when the tourist office is open? Monday at 10am? No, I'd say it's probably Saturdays and Sundays...when the bloody tourist office is shut!!!

Maybe it's my own fault for not knowing that it would be shut at this time and not getting there earlier, but in my defence, I found the address of the office on the official site for tourism in the Comunitat Valenciana. And is it such a wild notion that I expected it to be open at some stage in the day? But anyways, we ended up navigating the city by way of the photo of the map on my camera and found it quite an agreeable place. It was just a bit irksome trying to figure out which of the bell towers was the bell tower I had intended to check out!

(P.S. I suspect this post has been in some way influenced by the fact that I've been reading a lot of Bill Bryson recently :-)

Appendage to my first ever second post

2007-07-06T10:44:00.000+01:00

My brother received the following recommendation from Amazon:

Amazon recommends "Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution" by Stephen Cosgrave
We recommend the items above because you purchased or rated: Barrys Irish Gold Blend tea bags 80ct

Firstly, yes my brother did buy tea bags from Amazon. Apparently 5 minutes is too long to have to walk to Tesco ;-)

But seriously, Amazon needs to fix the algorithm that finds relations between these items. Or at least the metadata they're using to describe them. If you yourself, dear reader, have received such emails, do let me know.

Computer Game Banned

2007-06-29T10:22:00.000+01:00

Ok this news is a bit dated but what can you do? So for the first time ever, the Irish Film Censor's Office has banned the release of a computer game, Manhunt 2, for being "bleak, callous, and encouraging visceral killing". It's also been banned the UK. Now first of all, balls to the censorship but that's another story for another day.

What I'd like to point out is the effect that banning this game could possibly have. First of all, I or anyone I'd spoken to on the subject, had never heard of Manhunt nevermind it's imminent sequel. So while banning this game may have stopped casual purchases of the game, I know it would have passed under a lot of people's radars had it not become a national story. But instead it's been featured in 4 separate stories on rte.ie which include numerous links to the developer's website, containing trailers et al. for the game.

Anyone who originally wanted the game will have no problem getting their hands on a copy, be it abroad or online. And now all the publicity received by the decision to ban the game will surely spur the interest of many parties, gaming nerds and yours truly included, and I'd dare say that the business received on the basis of this free advertisement may outweigh the business lost on casual purchases by banning the game. It serves the censors right, fascists.

Who was it that said there's no such thing as bad publicity? Give that man a can of coke.

My first ever second post

2007-06-27T12:50:00.000+01:00

Every now and then I get these emails from Amazon, as I'm sure most people do, which recommend things for me to buy based on my previous purchases. Today I received one such email recommending 2 items.

1) Seinfeld Season 8 DVD boxset
Why? "...because you purchased or rated: Seinfeld Seasons 1-3 [1993], Seinfeld Season 4, Seinfeld Season 5, Seinfeld Season 6, Seinfeld Series 7"

Fair enough, the second item...

2) "The God Delusion" (book) by Richard Dawkins, described in one review as "...an acerbic polemic that argues that the Abrahamic religion, from which Christianity, Judaism and Islam are off-springs, are essentially at odds with and diametrically opposed to modern, educated, scientifically aware societies."
Why? "...because you purchased or rated: Philips SBC HP820 Headphones"

Am I missing something??

My first ever post

2007-06-27T12:25:00.000+01:00

I'd been humming and hawing over starting one of these things because a) I don't really have anything (interesting) to say and b) I was pretty sure the novelty would wear off and I'd stop being up-to-date. So how come I started I hear you cry? Well, as you will see in my first ever second post, I came across something interesting to share, and couldn't think of a way to share it with everyone besides mass spamming, or by individual accounts, which never works because you always forget who you told and you end up repeating yourself and blah blah blah...so I decided to do this thing. That's reason 'a' covered! 'b' I can almost assure you is waiting in the wings. But alas, don't fret. Just stick my feed in your bookmarks so that when you least expect it, your day will be brightened by a dose of me and your life will be good again.

Finally, I thought "Random Musings" would be a nice tidy name for the blog, only to discover that half of the blogoverse (??) has had the same idea, so I'm going to have to be a bit more clevererer...