Robots in disguise – deep disguise!

This is the Megatron I remember from Transformers. 

This is the Megatron from the upcoming movie ‘Transformers‘.

This ain’t no post.

It seems that everyone is blogging; except me. I’ve been looking though my blogroll, (Where did that term come form?) and all the great blogs that I check have new and interesting topics covering odd perfume reviews to ten places on earth that someone won’t visit again.

Doubts

I have to be honest; I’ve hit a wall when it comes to the blog. It wasn’t easy in SD, but I got used to writing posts. I’m by no means a talented writer and I’ve been asked on more than one occasion, ‘who are you writing it for anyway?’ I’m still thinking about that.

I’ve tried on more than one occasion over the last two weeks to sit down and write something only to be distracted by some other, often meaningless task. I’ve been using the Emergent Task Timer, and I think its really excellent, it helps me focus on specific tasks, thanks to David Seah for creating it. I think that I’ve been letting myself be distracted to avoid writing posts and I don’t know why this is.

There are things that I keep noting to post; ‘the depressed barber and why it is so hard to get a decent hair cut for under 15 euro’, ‘the crap customer experience with O2 experience’, and ‘why Irish ‘Scangers’ should be banned from Grafton Street’. It’s all there and more! For example Maggie has visited and since gone back to SD, and has there been any mention of going to Croke Park, or the Guinness Store House, or the Porter House or my mum’s house?

If there was a term for a psychological inhibition preventing a blogger from proceeding with a post, I think it would have to be termed “Bloggers Elbow”.

Time – my foe.

I’ve had little or no time to do anything other than ‘work’ with my PC/MAC.  I’ll have an update soon.

Maggie has landed

It seems good fortune has patted us on the behind again.  Maggie managed to miss all the mayhem at LA airport by arriving a week early.

She got to Dublin without any problem and didn’t know about the ‘plane plotters’.  She did tell me that the queue though immigration was fairly long however that’s for different reasons.
BBC Coverage of terrorists: Click here

Maggie is in the air

Maggie was due to come to Ireland on August 15th to spend some time here before she returns to finish her degree. She’s on the home straight now, her last semester at SDSU.

Because she’s not so busy at work these days we decided to bring her to Ireland a little early. So as I write this she’s on her way to L.A. to get a flight to Dublin. She’ll arrive in Ireland on Thursday at 11:00am.

Excellent. I’m in a very good mood even in these plague-like conditions!

Plague Watch…

Okay, I may have jumped the gun on my plague assertion. You can stop the repenting and return to whatever it was you were doing before you decided to repent…for now.

The frogs may be coming from a pond that is located in a neighbour’s garden.

Still I’ll be keeping my eyes open for other signs of Plague or plague-like activity.

We’re doomed, its all over…

I don’t want to alarm anyone. I’ll just write it and let you think about it.

I think that God, The Lord Almighty, may be sending a plague to visit.

Yesterday the gang came running in to tell me that there was a frog outside the door. I could not believe it. I went outside and low and behold there was a tiny little frog, jumping around and having a great time. It was so small it could have fit on your little finger.

Today Sis-in-law said that she saw at least ten by the garden shed. That’s when I started to think ‘Plague’.

So I ran upstairs and got my camera. I thought briefly about packing a bag and making for the airport, I mean who wants to be around when the plague starts, but where to go? Too much confusion, people are starting to panic. Calm down, I told myself.

Anyway I went back downstairs with the camera and took some pictures. I’ll let the evidence speak for itself. The first shot shows a slug. Why? Well who knows if a plague of slugs will be visited upon us. He does, that’s who. So keep your eyes open for slugs. That’s the main bullet point of my post.

Anyway, the other shot clearly show the frogs. Repent people repent.

Has anyone else noticed an increase or frogs suddenly appearing in their garden?

P.S. If anyone has any juicy gossip information that they want to repent, feel free to let me know.

What were the ten plagues? Click here if you dare. 

Opps!

I just realized that I had misspelled the word ‘Pi’ in my last post as ‘Pie’.
In my defense I was hungry when I wrote the post.

The circumference of a circle is π times its diameter. A straight line may be marked off in equal measures, each the diameter of a given circle. This may be done legitimately with the classical construction methods of Euclidean geometry, using compass and straightedge. Departing entirely from classical construction, we may mount the given circle on a wheel and roll it along the straight line, unrolling the circumference as we go. The wheel rim is covered with red paint, which is transferred to the road as the wheel travels. As shown by the animation, it travels an unusual, counterintuitive distance before making a full revolution: almost one-seventh again beyond three diameters. This is the number π.

Want more Pi?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi

Get the tire iron and whack me with it…

Perhaps one in every hundred people experiences a blending of the senses. This is called synaesthesia. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Since arriving home I have not watched a lot of TV except for Sesame Street’s Learn the alphabet. I’ve watched a lot of this show.

Baby Bear’s problem is that he’s forgotten the alphabet. He gets as far as the letter D but then Goldie Locks, the big show off that she is, appears and finishes the alphabet for him.

My ten-year-old nephew got this video when he was about two years old. Now the current two-year-old is having a blast watching it three to four times a day.

Drinking again?

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish

I read the transcript of this speech in an email I got from a friend when I was in San Diego. I thought the transcript was excellent. Tonight I stumbled on the video.

Voice ‘Wreck’-ignition!

Check out my clever word play with ‘recognition’ in the title.

Now check out the excellent voice recognition software on Microsoft’s still to be delivered operating system Vista.

It wouldn’t be a proper MS product demo without the failure.

Onions will make you cry…

Sin-in-law and brother went to the Galway races on Wednesday.  My job was to look after the gang, who ranged from two years to ten years in age. 

The gang and I decided that we would get some Pizza for dinner and a DVD, so off to the DVD store we went.  They decided on ‘Big Momma’s House’ and ‘Inspector Gadget’.  Not my type of film, then again my opinion doesn’t count because I’m only the Uncle!

The Italian restaurant where we used to get Pizza’s for DVD nights was gone.  It has been   replaced by ‘Silvio’s chip shop’.  Not to worry, I thought we’ll order from the house.

Back at home I looked for a menu, found one after five minutes looking for a ‘new’ venue called ‘Eastside Pizza’.  As far as I can tell it is part of the ‘Step Inn’ Bar.  I decided to give them a try. 

I collected the orders from the gang and phoned in my order. 

Me: Do you deliver?

Him: No

Me: I have an order for three 10” pizzas

Him: Okay 

Me: First pizza with Ham, Pineapple, Salami and pepperoni. 

Him: Ham, Onion, Pineapple, Salami and pepperoni. 

Me: No Onion please.

Him: Onion!

Me: No Onion.

Him: Okay, no onion.

I placed the next two orders and had a similar conversation about Onions each time.  This should have set the alarm bells ringing in my head. 

Me: How long will that take? 
Him: Fifteen – twenty minutes.

Me: How much will that be?

Him: 36 euro and seventy cent.

He actually said that without laughing!

Fifteen to twenty minutes later I loaded the gang into the car to drive down the road to collect the Pizzas.  I double parked in the pub car park and ran in to collect the goods.

Me: Hi, I called in an order, my name is Harrison!

Him: What time did I tell you, thirty minutes or thirty-five minutes?

Me: You told me fifteen to twenty minutes.

Him: Okay

Me: So how long will it be?

Him: Another five minutes. 

So that’s five minutes longer than I expected but five to ten minutes shorter than he thought he told me!

Confused?  Imagine how I was feeling.

We arrived home with the food, the guys got the DVD set up and I opened the Pizzas. 

There was Onion on every one of the Pizzas.  My frustration levels went north, and I wished I was back in San Diego. 

The pizza appeared not to have been cooked in a Pizza oven but on one of those pizza grill things where the food is cooked from the top and bottom on a conveyor belt thing.  Apache Pizza uses this technique and it’s not all that nice.

All of the Pizzas were sprinkled with a spice and all the gang came to the same conclusion; too hot (spice), and not nice. 

I’m still annoyed and frustrated by it.