Poker power

Julie and I had an excellent lunch at Boccacio’s on Dame Street today, which was made all the more entertaining by the otherwise ordinary-looking bloke on the next table receiving a call back from Paddy Power. Apparently he’d phoned to complain about some adverts for their online poker service that he’d seen in a public toilet, and made it perfectly clear that he was appalled and outraged by double entendres such as “Get your hands on a big pair tonight” and “The man next to you is watching your hand”. He was equally appalled that they had not been cleared by the ASAI because it was not “compulsive” (sic) to have them reviewed prior to being posted, and that they would remain in place to “disgust” other people over the festive period.

You do have to wonder if some people have too much time on their hands…

Nollaig Shona

My Christmas break started on Wednesday, and I won’t be back in the office until January 9th (except next Wednesday to see if I won anything in the annual corporate-gifts-we’re-not-allowed-to-accept raffle). I don’t anticipate that GNOME usability will suffer in any way while I spend the next month parked on a beanbag eating chocolate and trying to finish as many of my old PS2 games as possible so I can pick up some new ones in the January sales, but my waistline inevitably will. Happy whatever-it-is-you-feel-like-celebrating!

sbackup

Was looking for a painless utility to do regular incremental backups of a bunch of stuff on my Ubuntu box today, and ran across sbackup, which was sponsored by Google’s summer of code. The UI could do with a little polish, but it was dead easy to set up, and so far it looks like it’s just the job. (Might even have a go at getting it to work on OSX, as I’ve yet to find a free OSX utility that does what I want quite so easily.)

Best and worst

After all the OTT hoo-hah about alcoholic wife-beater and sometime Dunstable Town stalwart George Best finally carking it in the press over the past few days, the few seconds given to the untimely death of world champion rally driver Richard Burns on the BBC news yesterday was a bit rubbish, really. (Although maybe it’s just as well; it’s always kind of frightening to think of that sort of thing happening to somebody the same age as you.)

Kea-no thanks

I do hope Roy Keane doesn’t join Celtic. Not because of his ability– it’s always a good laugh when injury-plagued has-beens join the Old Firm and sap their resources while doing nothing more than lying on the treatment table. But if nothing else, it would be bound to encourage even more people to flock over to Glasgow from Dublin Airport every weekend, and there’s already more than enough vileness in the air when Rangers and Celtic fans come to town, without high profile Irish signings and a stadium full of tricolours to provide certain elements with even more targets for their sad vitriol.

Yes, Celtic FC was founded by an Irish priest. Ancient history, get over it everyone. Irish sports fans who actually care about football more than history would do well to direct their air fares and gate money towards their local league teams instead for a while, to improve the quality of the grass-roots Irish game instead of glory-hunting in Glasgow. And more importantly, to give the West of Scotland a bit of space to sort out its nasty sectarian problems, rather than (innocently or otherwise) adding to them.