Spikey Pillow

Last week I visited Sardinia for my sister's wedding. Which I might add was very nice, and yes, the dress was beautiful. (Incidently, it had a slit up the side almost to the top of her leg. Apparently the natives were scandalised that anyone could get married while exposing their leg. Of all things! However, we didn't let such trivialities stop us from getting on with all the marriage stuff like heartily singing psalms in Latin.)

Sardina produces it's own wine, along with other drinks such as the infamous grappa. Sardinia also consumes a lot of it's wine. This is a typical wine store. Are those re-furbished petrol pumps? I can only hope not.

sjf:    So why don't they use a less ghey build system?
andrei: Who is 'they'?
sjf:    The maintainers.
andrei: There are no maintainers...
sjf:    Just Jeff?
andrei: Us.
sjf:    We are the maintainers!?!?!?!
        Argghhhh!!!
        I've submitted _myself_ to dailywtf.

Here's an example of some of the delights of the Scheme to C compiler. I didn't write this. I can only assume that it was written by some one back in the days of yore when DEC was a real company and not a back office at HP, or where ever it is today.

Yes, 50 arguments are all anyone would ever want to pass to a function. And not only did they write each case 1 to 50 out by hand, they did it twice!

Scheme to C

I made my first submission to the flickr group Stick Figures in Peril.

It's from the side of a strange looking railway car next to the university airport.

This is my favouritest flickr group, before I saw it I never got the whole flickr thing. The comments and interpretations are hilarious, you never realise just how much we take the meaning of these signs for granted.

I mean, should we be protecting our children from houses on giant sleds? Or watching out for falling cars?

However recently the group has appeared on digg, boingboing, etc. so there has been a slew of submissions, and very few good comments. If you look at the earlier photos there are some very funny ones.

I may post some of my favourites later, but now I had better get back to work.

Although I've only been here for a couple of weeks I kinda miss home. I spend a lot of time walking around the countryside and it reminds of being at back in Wexford. The countryside here is really similar to Ireland, lots of green fields, trees, etc. In fact, the Indiana countryside is probably more vibrant than Ireland (emeralde isle, my eye!*).

So I've come up with a couple of ways of feeling less homesick.

Watching technolotics. Technolotics is a vid/pod cast about tech and political news made by a couple of people from Trinity. It's really funny and if you read slashdot you'll find the stories pretty interesting. (Btw, Gareth your hair was better before you got it cut ;p).

Technolotics made me feel a bit less homesick, but then I found an even better method. Listening to Today FM's live stream. It's exactly like being at home: the accents, the lame jokes, all those ads for SSIAs. I could almost smell the hobo pee*. In fact it reminded me so much of what it's like back in Dublin that suddenly I am glad to be here.

*For any foreigners, 'my eye' is an Irish exclamation which essentially means, 'yeah, right' or 'as if'. I like to use it just because it sounds so silly.

*Living on Townsend St, only about 20 metres away from the geographical centre of Dublin has given me a rather tainted view of Dublin life. There is a methadone clinic I pass everyday on the way to college, which happens to coincide with the daily distribution of chemical goodness. Every morning I awake to the sounds of drunken or soon to be drunken skangers yelling at each other. On the way to the shop at night I have to go down Fleet St, passing by the refuse point for Independent Newspapers and the Westin Hotel. So I am required to scurry down the street holding my breath while trying not to step in the trails of hobo pee. I know this isn't what city life is about but sometimes I just can't get over the fact that people are pissing outside my front door. Vote Sarah for public urinals!