| An Spáim |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|05:06 pm] |
New levels of weirdness. Just received my first ever spam email... IN IRISH.
Since I don't speak it, does anyone wanna have a shot?
( letter ) |
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| Dublin Bikes |
[Nov. 6th, 2009|03:23 pm] |
Therese's birthday is next week but we celebrated it last night with dinner and a Yo La Tengo gig. Traffic getting into town was a mare, so I parked on Fitzwilliam square and started jogging down to the Molly statue. As I came around the corner, I found a Dublinbikes stand, so I decided it'd be a good time to give it a shot. Had already sent off for the smartcard months ago.
Worked out deadly! Bikes are a bit granny-ish and the big basket makes them a tad top-heavy, but everything is in order - bike light which appeared to come on automatically, bike lock included (though I didn't try it - not sure if it was meant to be there), saddle was at the right height, and rental system was easy enough to use. The smartcard was already linked to my credit card, so now payment or anything was needed. Only hiccup was that *it* asks *you* what bike from what stand you want to rent - instead of telling you. Slightly thrown by the question, I had to walk over and make a note of a stand number with a bike and come back. Then the thing goes "Yes, there's a bike there." I knew that, Dublinbikes.
I was still 25 mins late for Tee, so downer, but then I had to drop the bike back. I used Dublinbikes.mobi on my iPhone to get a map of the locations, but it's a hard site to use on a phone, cause the icons are too big and you can't zoom in far enough. The main .ie site is worse, far too many clicks required to get to the 'fo. I cycled up and down Dawson St looking for the stand indicated on the map, but couldn't find it - turned out later it's actually on Molesworth St a dozen metres around the corner, and just out of sight. Larger map resolution would have shown this. Get on the case, Dublinbikes.mobi / Dublinbikes.ie.
I finally found a stand on Stephen's Green East. The drop off is even easier than I expected - you just ram it into the slot (that's what she said), no interaction with the screen required. Then I had to run back to Venu where I'd left Tee. 15 mins delay there.
Must try again when I'm not rushing due to keeping my bird waiting 25 + 15 = 40 fucking minutes. Other blokes get dumped for less. *slaps wrist* |
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| Timelapse |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|05:51 pm] |
Back in January 2007, they started knocking down an old factory, the McCambridge's Stoneground Soda Bread Loaves factory, in the Sandyford Industrial Estate, so I decided I'd make a timelapse of the construction of the replacement building. Little did I know the huge undertaking this would be.
For the next 2 years, I occasionally took new pictures from the 7th floor of my building. You're ideally supposed to take *loads* of pics, like at least daily, but this was more like weekly or even once a fortnight. The next fatal error was that I used to photograph by just walking up, snapping an image, and head back to my desk. No, no, no! This results in every picture looking slightly different which has to be manually corrected afterwards. Potentially *hundreds of times*. In addition the original building was single-storey and the finished one nine storeys, so I had to aim the camera higher and higher as time went on. This also had to be corrected for. Also did I mention that I used a camera phone?
I noticed that the builders slowed waaay down towards the end of last year and the beginning of this, in response to the downturn and the fact that there now wouldn't actually be any demand for what they were creating. They finally finished around March. The daunting task of editing all 100 images was next. Since the camera was located and oriented differently for each one, I had to manually line up each image with the last like an animator for a cartoon. Most images had to be rotated slightly to the horizon line too. There was at least 30 minutes of manual processing needed per image. The sheer tedium of it meant I only finished about 2 weeks ago. It had taken around 5 months.
Finally I wisely didn't use Microsoft Movie Maker to put it together, plumping for a freebie app off the web instead which was about a thousand times better than the MS one.
Lessons learned:
- Use a better camera
- Take each photo from the exact same position
- Anticipate where the top of the finished building will be and aim the camera that way
- Learn how to use Photoshop and get that to do the fancy bits
Of course an even better way is to just get hold of a PC that faces out the window, lash a webcam on that, and use a script to take a photo every day for a year - though of course it isn't always possible to get your hands on a setup like this. |
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| Codger-googoo |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|04:02 pm] |
Was reading a while back on the web about the reunion gigs of Kajagoogoo. Seriously, this band reunification thing has got to stop! Back to your retirement home, guys.
Why am I picking them out for extra criticism? Well, The Kaj for me really epitomised the sense of youthful optimism that the early 80s was all about - note their jaunty facial expressions and brightly-coloured, non-matching clothes - not to mention the bloke that looks like a girl on the right. The 80s saw music overhauled as it went electronic and digitised, the music video became an artistic expression almost as valid and important as the music itself, and fashion went ballastic as hairspray allowed for gravity-defying quiffs and clothing was no longer limited to the colours of the primary pallette.
So when I saw the grey skin, crows' feet, jowls, silver birch hair and physiques skinny not from young fitness but age, it was a like a vision of death. There's no way I could ever go to a gig like that. Music should be about vitality and new discovery, it shouldn't make you cry for lost youth.
I had a disturbing vision of my own death a few years ago. I was in a science museum in Vancouver, Canada and they had a display where you had your photo taken and it would digitally age you to any age you specified. Innocently, I got it to age me to 65. Then a picture of an old man came up on the screen. He looked remarkably like my dad. The full horror that this was in fact me started to set in. It was an old man, but he definitely had my eyes. They were filled with sadness as of a life marred by regret. It was like seeing the end of my life.
I'm still fucking traumatised. By Kajagoogoo, too, mind. |
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| A Strange Day |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|11:36 am] |
Strange day today.
I hung a Thai on a Pole and climbed up to Czech if he was Chile. Instead I found that he was Latvian at me, and said "U R guay". Russian back down the pole, I fell and injured myself.
The doctor's was closed though. I said, "I'm hurt bad. Jamaican exception for me?" and he agreed. He tried to Finnish examining me as quickly as possible. He said I'd Spained my ankle and fractured my Ukrainium.
When I got home I was Hungary as I hadn't eaten all day, so I made myself a Turkey and Swede sandwich.
On TV, there was a piece about how a theatre company had lost about a Brazilian pubic wigs when their freight ship sank in a storm. I watched in amazement as they showed countless 'Mericans floating on the ocean. |
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| Eulogy to Geocities |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|02:57 pm] |
On Monday next, 26th October, Geocities is closing. Feeling surprisingly upset about this.
Does anyone remember Geocities? A forgotten relic of the early days of the Internet, it was important back in pre-social networking days when it could be used to create a personal site or design your company's homepage on the cheap. It was swallowed up by Yahoo eons ago, retaining the brand, and continued to do a brisk trade in hobby sites and other bric-a-brac, before the army of social networking behemoths began their march across the landscape of the web. MySpace, Bebo, Facebook all took over the territory and made Geocities homepages look quaint and first gen. This, despite the interior design disasters that MySpace and Bebo are famous for! Even those disasterpieces seemed hi-tech compared to the rudimentary HTML skills of your average Geocities user.
However, like my attachment to audio cassettes (which I only stopped listening to in 2000-fucking-5!), while the rest of the world moved on, I continued to use Geocities as my primary useful file repository. I liked how they had features such as textfile edit on the screen, and since the logon was unified with Yahoo, to whose mail I am perpetually logged into anyway, it meant that I was automagically perpetually logged onto Geocities - so their site acted like a virtual harddrive. Since I travel a lot, I needed a file repository that satisfied a few conditions:
- Online so it can be accessed anywhere
- Files can be altered/uploaded without needing an FTP client (think internet cafes)
- Easy logon (Yahoo ftw).
- Owned by a major corp so I know they aren't going to disappear overnight (I've had this happen before).
Geocities was one of the first websites I ever signed up to, and I've literally used it at least once a week for the last *12 years*. It's the only site I can think of that has persisted throughout my entire Internet-using lifespan - sure, there's Yahoo mail and some news sites too, but those are substantially altered. Geocities on the other hand, hasn't undergone a major usability upgrade *ever* - that I'm aware of - in its entire history. The homepage has changed a few times though (1996, 2000). There certainly haven't been any since I started using it in 1997, the year I lost my Web virginity, though I see on Wiki it's been going since 1994. Since the web is like a dog in that it ages faster than humans, this is like the site being a century old.
Instead of vanity URLs, where you access your site with a URL in the form of domain.com/username, they arranged their homepages in a street address fashion. There were different neighbourhoods for different content - e.g. Hollywood for media, and SiliconValley for tech stuff. Within this, subfolders split out the "street", and finally the different block addresses. The browsing method is unintentionally hilarious - a tagline proclaims joyously, "Click on a block number to browse through a hundred great home pages!". The modern web user of course shudders at the thought of all those unclosed HTML tags, BLINK keywords, and pink-and-red backdrops.
The neighbourhood/street/block system was abandoned in favour of vanity URLs back in 1999, but I love the clunkiness of it - a product of a time when Internet standards were pretty much non-existent.
I had a personal Geocities site all the way through college, long since taken down, and laughably childish to my adult eyes. It introduced my "Tweek" avatar for the first time. In 2002 I thoroughly overhauled the site, but never launched it, instead signing up to Bebo - to my eternal shame - and getting in on the social networking gig. Soon after, I abandoned Geocities personal site updates, concentrating on using it to store weblinks and logons and other important info that I have a habit of forgetting. (Logons? No, I didn't write the password. Just the email used to sign up. I'm not *that* stupid.)
On a lighter note, I see that the Internet Archive is planning on archiving the lot before it goes down for posterity. I've got a bad case of the nerd blues here, guys. |
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| What Is Social Networking Anyway? |
[Oct. 18th, 2009|09:25 pm] |
I don't blame members of the old generation for being confused by the Internet. It's a confusing place, constantly mutating and shifting, like a technological evolutionary race to find the coolest and the newest. But it's really embarrassing when they accuse it of being some lefty conspiracy to bully conservatives and the non-techsavvy. Jan Moir's Daily Mail column about how Steven Gately essentially died of "Gay" is a perfect example. She stated that there was a "heavily orchestrated internet campaign" against her.
Really? So Twitter users, for example, got together using mysterious social mobbing methods and went "Let's take Jan down?" She clearly doesn't understand what social networking is or even the basics of sites like Twitter, much less what a "trending topic" is. She seems to think that Twitter is some fanclub for lefty liberals that find out about what conservatives are saying and then sit there at their keyboards, taking potshots at them.
All that happened was that Twitter users (and everyone else) found out about the story, were incensed by it, and began sharing links and condemning her remarks. Her column was published and the public (not just the Left) criticised her for what she said. Plain and simple.
Her comments about the campaign being "heavily orchestrated" show she doesn't understand that what she's observing is news networking spreading information at lightspeed. There can be no agenda, or any kind of orchestration, here. Like a brain's conscience, which cannot be pinpointed but is known as an "emergent phenomenon" as it arises spontaneously as the result of the complexity of its otherwise simple components, social networking has a massing effect. Concepts like trending topics can only exist when there are a large number of participants and observers. But the fact that the vast majority of these participants are anonymous to each other makes any kind of large-scale organisation of their tweets, or the implementation of an agenda, absolutely impossible.
Moir's defence, therefore, comes across as nothing other than a messy mix of fuddy-duddy and paranoia. |
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| Movie Formulae |
[Oct. 8th, 2009|07:11 pm] |
I've noticed that a lot of movies these days are a mashup of two different, unrelated genres - with the predictable mixed results.
Martial Arts + Cute furry animals = Kung Fu Panda
Sci-Fi + Gritty Reality Documentary = District 9
Sci-Fi + Zombies = Pandorum
Zombies + Comedy = Zombieland
Any I've missed? |
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| Things Wrong With The Twitter Site |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|01:59 pm] |
- When you tweet, it's added to the feed but other recent tweets from other people only appear when you refresh the screen.
- Seaching for trending topics only shows recent results. Old tweets appear to become "obsolete" and aren't searchable.
- Can't browse a tweet feed by date.
- No way to know what tweet a response was aiming at (Tweetie on iPhone has this though).
- Many tweeters are compulsive and tweet >30 times a day. I'd like a way to get only a % of these. I've no choice but to stop following them to prevent my feed consisting entirely of their tweets.
- Trending Topic search is frequently very slow or unavailable. It also appears to miss recent tweets, i.e. there's a lag between a tweet being added and its trending topic tag becoming searchable. I noticed this when Watch&Tweet-ing The Princess Bride. I calculated the lag at about 5 minutes.
- Refreshing a TT search by altering the URL doesn't work. (Appears to be disabled on the server end). So to refresh the search, I have to open a new tab. (I'm using FF, is it like this for everyone else too?)
- No way to view a series of exchanges between yourself and another person in the form of a conversation á la iPhone text messages.
Needs work, clearly.
I know about the desktop Tweetdeck app, but there are things I don't like about that. The New Tweet alert is very distracting, and the Facebook Status feed doesn't filter out my friend baggage friends. On FB, my feed omits these cause I filtered them out, but Tweetdeck doesn't seem to take this into account and shows everything. I have a lot of FB friend baggage (an upcoming post on this).
On a related topic, I was reminiscing recently about the idea of "unfriending" yourself from someone in real life. As an adult or even a teenager, there's no method of doing this, which is why Facebook unfriending etc. is taken as a socially awkward move that causes friction the next time you meet that person in real life. However, young kids do have this. When I was a kid, you could walk up to someone and go:
"I'm breaking friends with you."
This was exactly like FB unfriending - they now were no longer considered to be your friend, so no interaction was allowed. It was an offical statement of intent that had to be taken very seriously. You could reestablish friends later if you wished, once you had forgiven them for their transgression: "Let's be friends again."
So, basically, FB friending and unfriending rekindles a phenomenon people won't have engaged in for about 10-15 years. |
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| Twitterati |
[Oct. 6th, 2009|12:28 pm] |
Having a good time reading the Wiki page on Twitter. In particular, the section on the content of tweets.
An incredible 40% of all tweets are categorised as "Pointless babble". Am I surprised? No.
Though maybe I'm just ignorant and these tweets are actually "peripheral awareness" or "social grooming" - what wank.
Ah no, I love it really. |
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| Party Political Broadcast |
[Oct. 1st, 2009|06:05 pm] |
Just received a "No to Lisbon" pamphlet in the door. Temperature rose like an oven. If this is representative of No literature in general, then truly this debate has reached the level of farce. List of buzz terms: Nazi, police state, Holocaust, GMO, authoritarian, superstate. Tropes of the Eurosceptic so tired that even British tabloids seem to have gotten sick of them. It contained gems such as "Do we want to be relegated to a minor player in Europe?" As opposed to, like, a player the size of Germany? We are a minor player, we'll always be one. "We'd be giving up centuries of independence to join a superstate." We've had 88 years of independence and there is no independence involved in accepting the Lisbon treaty. Bizarre claims were made about the guarantees given to Ireland (which we didn't need) - the result would be we'd be forced to eat genetically modified crops, give each other abortions, and our young people would get conscripted off to fight on Israel's side against Palenstinians or something.
The way a small country achieves greatness has always been to associate itself with larger, more important allies. It's the secret behind the success of rich small nations such as Denmark and Switzerland which can't hope to have massive home markets and huge levels of attendant industrialisation and therefore concentrate more on cultivating relations with neighbours - in the hope of winning FDI and offshoring contracts from their companies. The last 20 years have seen this work a charm in Ireland and the way we keep this gig rolling is to maintain close friendships with the EU and the USA (via our EU membership - US companies want to see a stable nation following EU law which means they'll know what they're getting when they invest.)
Christ. Please, everyone, I'm getting really activisty and right-on here but vote fucking Yes and let's have some sanity back. |
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| Singing |
[Sep. 15th, 2009|11:01 am] |
< controversy > I don't like this thing nowadays of singing in your heavy native accent. Arctic monkeys and Biffy Clyro, I'm looking at you. Americanize yourselves, please - a softer accent makes the singing flow better. And as for The Kooks! In fact anyone involved in Nu Rave should just self-immolate. Or at least get elocution lessons. |
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| Languages |
[Sep. 8th, 2009|04:39 pm] |
When you translate another language directly into English, it sounds quite odd. Here are some Spanish sentences as they would be literally in English. See bottom for the meanings of the weirder ones.
Hello! Such?
- Graces. - Of nothing.
I'm busy. Don't molest me.
The comedian was very diverting.
I'm preoccupied. She's still not back.
I have searched for a long time for it... Ah, that yes that it is!
I have something for you. Here you have.
I don't like him. He's sour milk.
Come on, you should join in. Don't be a water party.
One moment, I have to answer the phone.... Tell me!
He's so unusual. He's the black goat of the family.
It happened there are five years.
Would you like a free beer? I invite you.
Don't be so sad. Animate yourself!
I'll pay you five euro. You stay with the change.
Have you seen Juan? ... Oh wait, speaking of the king of Rome.
I don't believe you. You're pulling my hair.
There's also Weird Translations, which translates English sentences into foreign languages and back again. They certainly lose something in the process.
I love how the French translation here renders "I've a bun in the oven and it's yours!" as "I've a brioche in the furnace and it's with you!" - and the way the Korean translation uses third personal indirect ("it returns to my place") makes it sound like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.
( Meaning of weird Spanish ) |
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| Even Rocky Had One |
[Sep. 7th, 2009|02:47 pm] |
Over the weekend, I was at another BBQ, this time Tee's work's Family Activity Day. She organised the whole thing. They had lots of cool shit, like archery, rifle range, BMX course, and go-karting. I went go-karting on the pedal yokes against 3 Poles, and came second after about 5 minutes of furious pedalling.
Then something weird happened. I walked away and everything started to go white. My energy level dropped to the bottom. I started gasping. I had to sit in the back of the car for nearly half an hour with the door open, sipping still water that a Polish couple bought for me after taking pity.
I'm ridiculously out of shape.
So, the last time I entered a 10k race, I just came on LJ and told everyone I was gonna do it. That meant I couldn't back out. So I'm doing it again.
Cue Montage Song, cause Jono is gonna start training up for the 10k Aware Phoenix Park run on 12th December. Montage!!!
Edit: Forgot to say, is anyone in on this? |
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| Hugs! |
[Sep. 4th, 2009|09:47 pm] |
Following from this post.
I've been thinking about the Mediterranean attitude towards close personal contact in interpersonal relations, and how this fits in with local cultural norms in a country like Ireland. When I say Mediterranean, I'm talking about all nations which are part of this cultural union - south Europe, north Africa, and most of Latin America. The areas outside Europe of course adopted these norms as the result of colonial influence. For research purposes, I'm mainly thinking of the nationalities which exist in large enough numbers in Ireland to provide a big enough sample:
Portuguese , Spanish , French , Italian * , Romanian * , Algerian *
Moroccan * , Tunisian * , Mexican , Brazilian , Argentinian , Uruguayan
There are other nationalities included here but they are not well represented in Ireland. They are assumed to be the same:
Chilean , Greek * , Libyan *
Close personal contact refers to the commonly encountered phenomenon whereby people hug and kiss even when they may only be acquaintances. In the case of starred nationalities, not only women kiss on the cheek or both cheeks, but men often do, too. (Correct me here if I'm wrong). I'll refer to hugging and kissy kissy as H&K from here.
Myself and Therese hang around with a lot of Mediterraneans in Ireland, due to our membership of the Couch Surfing website (which attracts lots of foreigner obviously), but also because there just are loads of Meds in Ireland anyway.
Below, I'm going to cover various life situations, and say what the behaviour of an Irish person in that situation would be compared to that of a Med.
( analysis ) |
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| Turned to Bone |
[Sep. 1st, 2009|12:43 am] |
A minor incident today annoyed me quite a lot.
I was in the canteen today in work and mentioned to a co-worker that I'd been at the Dun Laoighaire Festival of World Culture. The cook, who I was acquainted with, piped up with "Oh really, you went to that. Well I hope you got *completely* ossified." I said awkwardly, "Nah, nah, it wasn't that sort of vibe." "Yea, I suppose it was more about the dancing and music." "Yes. Yes it was."
What annoyed me was the way he assumed I had to get out of my skull in order to have a good time, but worse, if you saw the festival you'd see why it just wasn't about alcohol. Sure, people were having cans on the street everywhere you went, but everyone was behaving themselves so the plentiful cops didn't have to take any action. But the festival really was about the music, food and dancing - not drunken fuck dancing, but actual dancing-on-a-mad-buzz dancing. Maybe Dubs are finally growing up. But I just wish it wasn't considered "normal" to have to get fucking ossified to have a good time. |
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| Dubious product placement (snigger) |
[Aug. 24th, 2009|10:20 am] |
Just discovered the Kush Support. It's a pink plastic rod that you insert between your breasts in bed (sorry, I just couldn't say that with a straight face). Their product video is unintentionally hilarious. (It's about 80% SFW.)
The fact that the rod looks like a dildo seems to be lost on them. I discovered a parody that basically made all the jokes that sprang to my mind.
And who decided that the "mind the gap" breast separation is called a Kush? |
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| Drinking tales |
[Aug. 23rd, 2009|04:49 pm] |
Decided to encourage the development of drink discounting in Dublin by putting a list of places doing it on FB the other day. Kree got back and suggested that we have "a couple" of these cheap drinks in O'Reillys under Tara St, a pub I have not been in for over a decade. It was dark and a bit grim, but the 3.40 a pint wasn't a rumour and the drink flowed like a river of good times.
Going for a stroll outside, we ended up at the door of Q Bar beside O'Connell bridge. It looked empty inside and eventually we decided we'd patronise them, as they were looking forlorn.
Once tequila shots had been delivered, I surveyed the locale. Q Bar is like the dying gasp of the Celtic Tiger as it expired while impaled on a sharpened bamboo stick. The whole place was bathed in an ultra-now blue light, from LED bulbs no doubt. Trendies were sitting around, many looking thoroughly depressed. Groups of foreign types were engaged in intimate conversation while occasionally taking a sip from a semi-forgotten glass. Over near the dancefloor, a few braver souls were trying to get the party started with some self-conscious arm failing and two-stepping.
One of the great things about the capitalist system is that if your bar is a crock of shit, you'll die pretty quickly. The Celtic Tiger was like a life-support machine for hipster fucks with €15 cocktails and now that the plug has been pulled, the only Q is why places like this are still trading. |
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| Totally Rad |
[Aug. 9th, 2009|11:07 pm] |
French is the foreign language I know best, though Spanish is coming along. I started learning French when I was 6 cause my Ma is a Francophile and sent me to extra classes. The book we used then and again in secondary school, Hexagon, was published in the early 1980s. I've discovered something distressing lately though.
The team that I started off with in Microsoft, User Acceptable Test (Software testing), is being outsourced to Singapore with the loss of 8 jobs. The French guy in work was talking about the going-away party for them, which in French is called a "destruction party". I asked him if this would be called a "boum" and he went "Non non non!". It turns out that boum is a really dated, gauche word for party. On further questioning, it turned out that another word I used to use, "chouette" (amazing), is similarly old-fashioned 1980s slang.
There I was all this time, using 80s French slang. I'd been saying to Frenchos the equivalent of "That's so rad, dude", "Jump back!!", "happening!", and "Far out man" like I'm the dubbed Frenchie version of the Lost Boys or something.
Cringe. |
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