Getting there...

I think Dublin Bus is actually improving...

Random Musings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...