Category: General

Spent the weekend car browsing (and eventually, buying) with Julie. The Astra she brought over with her from the UK has been registered here for a year now, which means it’s now floggable without incurring the wrath of the Revenue Commissioners… so, next week she’ll be taking delivery of a black ’03 Vaux^H^H^H^HOpel Corsa Njoy with a trifling 8000 miles on the clock.

We went to see The Grudge at the weekend, an English language re-working of the Japanese Ju-On fright flick (and its sequels). Reviews had been mixed here (as they had in the States), but the majority pointed to the ‘worth seeing and really quite scary’ end of the scale.

It would probably have worked better had the cinema not been half-full of underage kids who couldn’t decide whether to giggle all the way through or just scream occasionally at the wrong bits, and therefore decided just to do both… but while it was nicely made, it had a few loose ends, and I never find that films where the all the scary parts are precluded by scary music ever really end up being all that scary. Julie thought otherwise, however 🙂

Finally caved in and bought Gitaroo Man when I saw somebody selling it cheap on Amazon the other day, as it’s not too easy to find any more– it arrived this morning. When trying to find the sort of game we might enjoy when the PS2 first arrived chez nous (Julie didn’t strike me as your Metal Gear Solid or Pro Evo sort of girl), it was a toss up between this and Mad Maestro, in the rhythm genre… we went for MM, and on first impressions of Gitaroo, it’s probably just as well– Gitaroo is a lot more difficult, or at least it gets difficult a lot more quickly. Looks like good fun, though…

Julie sent me this little gem of a game today (sound required)… so far I’ve only managed to get him into second grade though 🙂

Hot on the heels of the eminently-useful (but sadly illegal, in many places) cellphone jammer, Ananova reports on the inevitable mutation of the universal remote control– a keyfob zapper that will turn off any TV, anywhere.

Been playing a lot with various instant messengers this week, and generally being
frustrated by their limitations. Got to thinking how neat it
might be if GNOME just had a “contact” applet that you could add to your
panel, one for each person you cared about– then you could arrange
them spatially to suit you, rather than having them in a meaningless
list. The icon (perhaps the person’s photo) could show their
online status, clicking it would open a regular IM window, and you
could right click to do the usual other stuff (send them an email, schedule
a meeting or whatever). Drop a file on their head to send it to
them. That kind of thing.

If Davyd’s idea takes off and the whole panel becomes a notification area, you’d have your own action-packed
desktop hackergotchi cartoon whenever somebody IM’d or /msged you, or
posted a new entry in their blog, or did anything else you were interested in (that you could write some sort of plugin for, anyway):

It all falls down a bit when you want to do something with a group of
multiple contacts though (email them all, arrange a meeting at a time that
suits them all)… ah well.

It’s official– I still have one of the worst-selling cars in the UK[1]:

Pos	Model			Number Sold
1	Honda NSX		12
2	Lamborghini Murcielago	12
3	Maybach 57/62		15
4	Fiat barchetta		29
5	Rolls Royce Phantom	47
6	Aston Martin Vanquish	61
7	Alfa 166		77
8	Bently Arnage		79
9	Renault Vel Satis	108
10	VW Phaeton		114

[1] Yes, I know Ireland’s not in the UK, but that’s where I bought it…

Once upon a time, before Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Roland Rat, getting ready for school in the morning was accompanied by one of two things. Listening to Good Morning Scotland[1] with Neville Garden and Malcolm Wilson; or turning on the telly and pretending you were posh enough to have teletext, by pointing an imaginary remote control at the TV while the BBC ran its rolling Ceefax InVision slot before daytime programming began. (Okay, maybe that was just me.)

Anyway, this week, the world’s first teletext service, Ceefax, is thirty years old and still going strong (unless you’ve got satellite telly). Originally just an experiment in subtitling, there was a time when half the UK’s population booked their holidays from ads on Ceefax, and there are probably few BBC licence payers who don’t know what’s on pages 302 or 606. And it’s not a bad way to get the latest headlines without the waffle, either– circumlocution isn’t a luxury granted to journalists who have to distill a story into 100 words or so. Online help writers take note 🙂

[1] Coincidentally, in 1980 BBC Scotland broadcast live pictures from the Good Morning Scotland studio while it was on air– the first breakfast TV ever shown in the UK, predating BBC Breakfast Time by three years.

Back in the office today after a week’s holibags in Malta with Julie, staying at the very pleasant Qawra Palace hotel.

Monday: Arrived Monday evening, dinner. Discover hotel entertainment is provided on the stage right outside our balcony: tonight it’s “Martin Elvis”, (sadly not this one) whose act neither requires nor deserves much in the way of explanation.	Tuesday: Lazy day by the pool, taking full advantage of our package deal’s unlimited free drinks and ice cream from the poolside bar. Tonight’s entertainment: an incomprehensible DJ whose output includes a lot of Elvis records.
Wednesday: Holiday rep finally shows up so we can book some excursions for the rest of the week. Wander up into Qawra to check out the grockle shops, followed by a lazy afternoon by the pool. Tonight’s entertainment: the aftermath of a brief but entertainingly-torrential Mediterranean thunderstorm, which cancelled the regularly scheduled programme.	Thursday: Coach tour of Malta– the church at Mosta with the third-largest dome in Europe (the other two belong to St Peter’s in the Vatican and Clive Anderson), the ancient city of Mdina, lunch at a lodge in Buskett forest, and a wander round the market at the fishing village of Marsaxloxx. Scary discovery: half the Maltese seem to have spent part of their adult lives in the UK, which leaves them sounding a lot like Bastien. Tonight’s entertainment: the same bloke we had on Tuesday, playing the same records.
	Friday: Lazy day by the pool. Finally get Thursday’s paper to find out what the Scotland score was on Wednesday, as BBC World apparently thought that Engurlund were the only team playing in the World Cup qualifiers this week. Tonight’s entertainment: a bloke with a glorified Casiotone and a drum machine, who sings a lot of Elvis songs.
Saturday: Day trip to the other (and classier) inhabited Maltese island, Gozo– more ornate churches, a couple of audio-visual shows, lunch in a swish hotel in Marsalforn, and the azure window at Dwejra. Catch the result of the Motherwell game when I get back to the hotel (which somewhat surprised me as I still thought it was only about Thursday), not to mention the cold that I’m still sniffing away with. Tonight’s entertainment: two blokes who must have recently invested in a copy of Big Hits of The Shadows and an EFTP amp, later joined by their sister who sings a lot of Elvis songs.
	Sunday: Valetta market, another church, elevenses at the priest’s gaff, and a boat trip around the Blue Grotto to round off the morning.Lazy afternoon by the pool. Tonight’s entertainment: the same two blokes who have now acquired a copy of Big Hits of The Shadows Volume 2, later joined by their sister who’s sadly failed to similarly expand her library of Elvis songs. Monday: Up at 3.30am for the transfer to the airport, back in Dublin by 11.30am. Made gnome-themes 2.8.0 release in the afternoon. Didn’t listen to any Elvis songs.

(These photos are mine, but you can find lots of others at maltavista.net.)

Discovered one of the drawbacks to living in a top floor apartment today– your water goes off when there’s a power cut, because the pump that compensates for the minimal head of water is electric too. Luckily I hadn’t quite made it to the shower…