Spikey Pillow

It's been an pleasant four years, but it's time I moved to a newer blogging platform. Nucleus has been surprisingly good, we've had our moments, but generally it's a reliable piece of software. However, I'm ditching it something with more features and I'm going to give Wordpress a try.

New blog

Let's start this off my making it clear, this is not a real Erdinger, it's some new flavour of Erdinger called Schneeweisse. It is still a wheat beer, but it doesn't the same taste or sweetness of original Erdinger. Schneeweisse translates literally as Snow-white, which is such a cute name it actually made me less mad at the beer for tasting so lame. There is the potential to confuse it for a bottle of Alkoholfrei Erdinger, don't make this mistake...

I was looking for an picture of the Alkoholfrei label on the internets, and found this. I can't work out whether they are promoting Alkoholfrei Erdinger as a suitable drink for athletes, or whether it's a subtle marketing ploy to associate alcohol-free beer with tanned muscular guys in loin cloths, and so increase sales of original Erdinger.

Lick here to find out.

Kalashnikov Vodka is coming to Ireland in the near future. General Kalashnikov stated in a press release that his goal is to fully satisfy the needs of all real men. The AK-47 was just the first stepping stone in his path for dominance of the male-orientated industry. By 2012 he hopes to have established his own chain of brothels nationwide. The General asks you to express your devotion to Kalashnikov Global by submitting your poems about vodka, guns, and women on the friendship page of his website.

Typing or playing a musical instrument in church uses more energy than vigorous sexual activity, according to calorie-count.com.

This site lists the calorie requirements of various activities, grouped into categories like: 'Religious Activities', 'Lawn & Garden', 'Volunteer Activities', and 'Sexual Activity'. (Note it is sexual activity, singular. Apparently there is only one approved method.) According to the site the most strenuous sex is said to require 102 calories per hour, lagging well behind other activities including:

• 258: Walking, 3.5 Mph, Brisk Speed, Not Carrying Anything
• 102: Typing: electric, manual, or computer
• 122: Studying: including reading and/or writing
• 156: Washing dishes/cleaning kitchen
• 170: Sitting playing an instrument at church
• 204: Cleaning at church
• 136: Eating/talking at church or standing eating
• 136: Walk/stand combination for religious purposes

Maybe it's best not to take this kind of advice from mid-westerners.

Autumn has arrived, that magical time of year when the leaves wither and fall from the trees, when a bitter icy cold starts to predominate, and when the rich emigrate to California.

As a consolation, most TV shows are resuming in the coming months, so at least we'll have something to do while trapped inside huddling up to the radiator.

So, here for your viewing pleasure is a schedule of when some TV shows are resuming.

Family Guy	Sun, September 23	Season 6: Blue Harvest
House	Tues, September 25	Season 4: Alone
Stargate Atlantis	Fri, September 28	Season 4: Adrift, Part 2
American Dad!	Sun, September 30	Season 3: The Vacation Goo
Dexter	Sun, September 30	But it it will be October 14 until an episode that wasn't leaked is on air
Scrubs	Fri, October 25	Season 7
Battlestar Galactica	Thurs, November 24	Season 4, last season. Apparently the director blames last season's atrocities on the Sci-Fi channel, who put pressure on him to make more standalone episodes. He says he won't make the same mistake this year.
Dr Who	Sun, December 25	Season 4: Christmas Special: Voyage of the Damned Damned indeed, Catherine Tate, from last year's Christmas special, is going to be the companion for the next season.

Leave any additions or corrections below.

Milk that tastes almost not quite like Homo. Does it come from specially selected cows? Or perhaps they are milked by particularly effeminate farm hands? So what does Homo taste like? Well, I was disappointed to discover it tastes just like Hetero milk.

...make an online service that sends a validation code by mail.

Not email, real mail. You know the kind with stamps, and ponies, and Kevin Costner.

ReachServices* allow you to look at your tax record and apply for refunds online. As anyone who has ever been the tax office in Cathedral St can testify, this would be pretty handy. However the catch is they have to confirm your PPS number, and they only way they seem to be able to do this is to send a validation code to your postal address. To avoid making things too inconvenient they will send you a reminder mail around the time the letter should have arrived prompting you to enter your code. The email also warns you that it will expire soon. 'Soon', when is 'soon'? What if I don't get the letter before the code expires? Will they send me another? Will they use exponential backoff or are all of us in the boglands doomed?

* Is that an aging Gary Lineker posing in their business clip art?

We got something in the post today calling itself Local News for Terenure. Apparently the most exciting thing to happen in the village is that you can now turn right in the village outside of peak hours.

You've gotta love suburbia.

Google ads just seem to be getting sillier and sillier. The other day someone was trying to sell me a multidimensional database on gmail. What exactly a multidimensional database does is unclear.

Today, I was looking up a quote from the bible to express my dissatisfaction with the world*. Here is the google ad that was on the site.

No, the answer wasn't the surprising thing.

* No particular reason, it's just one of those days. Here, by the way, is the quote:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ok, I promise no more religious references.

I was really looking forward to carbonated coffee, I mean what could go wrong? Coffee is great, fizzy is good, it seemed like a plan. Well the thing is Coke Cola Blāk isn't just carbonated coffee, it's carbonated coffee with coke and something else. A combination of coffee and coke alone couldn't possibly spawn the evil that is this drink.

I wrote the above three months ago but didn't post it because I was missing something. I just didn't know exactly what it tasted like, until now. Something terrible happened this morning. I went downstairs to make some coffee in my fancy-shamncy coffee machine only to discover that it had been on since yesterday morning. So about two cups of coffee had been slowly concentrated into a thick tarry mass.

That is what Coca Cola Blāk tastes like, burnt caramelised coffee that has been sitting in the machine for about week. Does anyone actually enjoy this? What were Coke Cola thinking? So many unanswered questions.

Recently Ebay's Google ads have been trying to sell me quite strange things:

You too can have your own traveller kid or animal slaughterer. Unfortunately if you follow the link there aren't any knackers for auction at the moment. Maybe later.

I was looking for Nithin on flickr, I wasn't aware he was available on ebay.

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.

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!