Went to Manchester for the weekend – first time there – and was really surprised by how nice and vibrant the city center was. The labor party was holding a conference there and I managed to get a look at the war / Palestine protest that was going on – quick snap below.

I spent Saturday night just outside Liverpool where I managed to get some hot tub action…

Caught a film ‘Trust the Man’ as well – it was ok – pretty much as expected…

Had a blast at Guy Grangers birthday on Friday night after work. Session at the Gingerman followed by Whelans. Was so out-of-it the next morning I managed to lock myself out of the apartment after checking a ‘knock on the door’. Luckily I had a phone, some cash and was wearing pants… Watched John Tucker must die (load of cack) and Right at Your Door (emotive) at the cinema before collecting the spare set of keys at the FastTrack at Heuston…

In other weird events – I parked my car beside an exact same model over the weeked – It was dark when I got back to the car park and mistook the other car for my own. Guess my surprise as my key opened this second car… Notice how clean it is (couldn’t be mine!)

Got my Java-Gnome developer status a few days ago, took me until now to get around to committing my first couple of patches.

Spent a while investigating a more “accepted” open source friendly development environment – but fell back to IntelliJ in the end with my own simple C syntax highlighting. I figure they’re plenty friendly anyways.

Just came across the following comic site while browsing Wi Wheaton’s site. It’s at http://xkcd.com/. It’s got so many facets.

For the last few weeks my computer has been getting more and more erratic. Spontaneous halts and reboots – I replaced most of the parts on the computer to see if I could isolate it – Hard Disks, SATA Controller, WiFi Card, Graphics Card etc… and nothing helped. Linux and Windows had the exact same behaviour. I was certain it was either the processor or CPU… In truth I started feeling a bit guilty about overclocking the CPU thinking I may have damaged It. Anways – What an excellant excuse to upgrade Chip and Mobo… As I posted previously I invested in a heavy duty graphics card to drive my monitor so I had to get an AGP mobo that was intel socket 775 and if I could find one that supported DDR as well as DDR2 better again… I found this motherboard in the shape of an Asrock 775Dual VSTA (I think the VSTA is a reference to it being Vista ready? eek!) Very cheap on komplett.ie

The main board along with an Intel 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo arrived yesterday. In replacing my existing motherboard… I think I may have found the cause of my stability problems… A more or less fried and useless Mainboard and Powersupply…

Crikey!

Just back from the wonderful spanish town of Leon. I was there for the wedding of my long time friends Hugh McDonagh and Maite Cosmen. We stayed for two nights – a lot of beer, fun and squid. The tapas bar culture in the city centre involved many bars (seats optional) that served up quater (“un corto”) or half pints (“una caña”) and along with it you got a tapas, the type of tapas was at the discretion of the barman. But most importantly – for free!

Below has to be one of the nicest pictures I’ve taken on my phone to date.

Saw Daft Punk in Marley Park on Friday with Moley, Col, Sinead & their friends. Best gig I’ve been at – they played all the right songs. Sold a spare ticket I had for face value in the queue about 60seconds before entering the park – wahoo! That coupled with myself and Sinead making into the VIPish pit topped off the experience. Pint with moley in town afterwards.

I hope moley doesn’t mind me pushing this out there. I tried a few times following a Photoshop tutorial on how to vectorise an image with various results, never succeeded with anything other than inanimate objects. This one however is made using some of the gimp’s and photoshop filters along with some blurring and smudging.

Four days ago now, an Irish Dublin based company called steorn took out a full page ad in The Economist claiming to have discovered a means of creating ‘free energy’ – i.e. perpetual motion – i.e. defying the first law of thermodynamics. They, through the ad, are trying to attract a top team of 12 scientists to come and test their technology. I’ve read similar stories on slashdot – and I occasionally buy the cheap ticket for admission into this ride, which is thinking about the incredible impact it would have on all.

I’ve also noticed steorn watch has been put up online…

A good 5 or 6 years ago I bought my first minidisc player the Panasonic SJ-Mj70. It’s been more or less out of commission for the last 3. Low volume was always a problem, but then roughly 3 years ago there bacame a 50/50 chance of the player reading and playing the disc properly. Now theres more like a 1 in 20 chance.

Long Playing MD’s, NetMD and HiMD have all come out since – but my deck at home and my MD collection remains good old standard MD. I happened across the SJ-MJ75 at a consumer electronics shop in Rathmines recently – and I decided €50 was a steal – even for outdated tech.