Dan returned from his holiday to the states with trip to the states with a very special package for me - a little Chrismas pressie for me, from me. am now the proud owner of a shiny new iPhone.
I've spent the last maybe, 5 hours playing with my new iPhone. I've unlocked it (with Dans help - thanks), used every feature in the phone, downloaded shit-loads of applications and browsed about 30 websites. And the verdict - I love it!
I'm impressively thin. The build-quality is great. The user interface is amazing.
GMail works great. Digg works great. YouTube works great. RSS feeds from Feeddemon work great.
Setting up itunes was simple. iTunes used to be such a piece of shit but it's now pretty good. It also seems that itunes no longers insists on copying all your music to it's own itunes folder, which is all good.
One annoying thing is that it didn't pick up my contains on the sim card. So I will have to use the software with my old phone to sync with Outlook and then sync from Outlook back to the iphone - I'll do that tomorrow evening.
Overall, it's just awesome. Normally I absolutely detest Apple Fanboyism but in all fairness, apple have made a great product here.
It really hacks me off when we were playing Team Fortress 2 in AREA51 that you have to use your Steam Community name in the game.
Like our gaming cafe of choice AREA51, many places run the Steam Cafe License Program (paying through the nose for the annual subscription it mind you - it aint cheap!!) which doesnt allow the locking of accounts to a Steam Community Profile.
I tried going to Console and typing name A51-Topper but that didnt work. Hat tip to Sam Kidd for figuring it out.
All you need to do is :
Open the console
Type : setinfo name A51-Topper
Cant wait for Tuesday now that we'll know who we're killing! We'll keep seeing "A51-Topper headshot A51-Sarge (aka A51-Chuck).
BTW, if you dont already know, Tuesday is the weekly gaming LAN night at AREA51, kicking off at 7pm and lasting till late. FREE cinema passes to be given away and everybody is welcome.
We play Day Of Defeat : Source, Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike. We've also been known to scrap it out in Age of Empires 2 (The Daddy RTS) and Battlefield 2!
I was invited to go sailing with my good friend, the Intrepid adventurer Captain Ed over the weekend. We headed due south with no solid plans. Ended up overnighting in Broadstrand bay and tore back the next morning with the wind at our back.
Our Course (roughly)
Some pictures
Thanks for the great weekend Ed.
For a more elegant description of the trip, click here.
Ach mein Gott! This blog has been sadly neglected.
I've been meaning to post here with ages but that task of doing a good post seemed just too much to undertake. So here we are, i'm not too concerned about making the post interesting - I just want to get something fresh up here.
I stopped blogged about 6 weeks ago when I went to visit my sister for a few weeks in Boston. I went over for my my niece's graduation from junior high or whatever the yanks call primary school. In Ireland we make no big deal of leaving primary school. Over in the states, it appears to be a huge ordeal with Mass, speeches, graduation dinner and the graduation ceremony itself. But then again we make a huge deal of The Confirmation here in Ireland. .
Anyhow I enjoyed the graduation and it meant buckets to Kayleigh that I went over - the hug she gave me when I suprised her was easily worth the €600 round trip.
When the graduation was over, I spent the bones of the next 3 weeks working on our latest project at Digital Crew - Teamwork Project Manager. I worked night and day on this puppy, quite literally. I can picture me still there, baking hot, wearing just shorts, slumpted on my sisters couch with legs up on coffee table and laptop on my um .. lap.. feverishly tapping away. I bored my sister and niece endlessly with my prattling on about the masterpiece I was creating. Teamwork PM will be released to the world in a few weeks! There are just a few improvements we want to make first.
Occasionally, I got cabin fever and went for a jog around a beautiful lake in nearby Cogshall Park. I couldn't find a single pic of Cogshall on the net but I did find this video:
I wasn't there on holiday as such and had to get work done so this trip was calm enough. But every other night, my sister and I visited the local pub for games of pool. I think the yanks were dumbfounded with our crazy Irish pool rules - "What do you mean you get a second shot?!".
It's fascinating to see how the social scene in middle America works. It's nothing like the big cities such as New York that most tourists experience. Everybody knows everybody else at least to see. Everybody loves the irish accent and I got the usual mindnumbing rounds of "I'm Irish too... My Great-great-great..." followed by the typical epic immigration story. You just have to grin and bear these things.
New England is a gorgeous landscape of placid lakes dotting a landscape of endless tall trees. Apart from the graduation. the highlight of this trip, was the kayaking excursion we took down a local river... it was beautiful and good craic!
I'm planning on returning in january and spending 2/3 weeks learning to ski properly - so I don't have to roar "Get out of the way - I can't stop" anymore.
Things I Learned in American (this time)
Massachusetts drivers are absolutely shockingly dismally painfully useless aggressive drivers. You have to be bloody careful.
CVS, one of the major pharmacys has trucks all over the States that drive around looking for broken down motorists to help for free! Apparantly my mothers car broke down at a dangerous junction last year and one of these trucks appeared. No way would the guy take money. Philanthropy is alive and well in America and I am very impressed.
On-demand TV is both a godsend and a demon. I half-watched endless movies on all night programming stints. Not to mention I watched every Law and Order, CSI Someplace and NSIC they would feed me. I rarely watch TV - It is the domain of the mindless, but when it's on-demand with no ads and any program or movie you want is only 12 quick taps of a remote away, it can't be helped.
Dunkin donuts are yummy - I love those jam-bon things. I wasn't in the states an hour before I was stuffing my fat face with chocolate covered, custard filled donuts.
No wonders Americans are fat. The REALLY tasty fattening food is the cheapest. MASSIVE bags pf crisps (or chips as they call 'em) are only 99c. I love those cheetos. I think I put on a stone.
No no, it was the hot pockets. They are * watering at mouth just now * sooo tasty.
Americans have lottery card vending machines in bars! Hmmm
In a nightclub, the way a guy approachs a girl seems to be to dance/grind behind her. If she grind back, your in. It's kinda strange. And Americans don't seem to play tonsil-hockey in public, even in a nightclub.
Karaoke is hugely popular. You get a lot of singers up due to the high confidence level.
Even average players own their own pool queues which they bring to the pub on a night out!
Everybody drinks bud light. Everybody!
While I was there, I was watching the news one morning (after another all-nighter) and was amused to see a spot 5 minutes away on tv swarmed in reporters and helicopters. A maintenance guy at a beautiful and prominent cemetary in Fitchburg was arrested for stealing a skull from a grave. He was usng the skull as an ashtray and an arm bone as a tobacco (or something) pipe. I shit you not!
American street signs are bizzarre. One of my sisters friends went into hysterics when I asked what SchoolXING on a sign was all about? And there was BikeXING. "What the fuck is that"? It's obvious in hindsight. SchoolXING is "School Crossing" and BikeXING is "Bike Crossing". Would those extra 5 letters kill ye?
Great name for those tattoos girls like to put on their lower back - "Tramp Stamps". Haha.
Pool parties and burgers go togther like paedophiles and candy. Americans know how to make burgers! Yum.
Everything (and I mean everything) has buckets of sugar in it. I got a Mr freeze (you know what I mean Irish people) when it was sweltering to chomp on. It had so much sugar i it that it was sickening. I couldn't get that satisfying chomp sensation and I almost didn't eat it.
In Ireland I shop for "Large (L)" clothes. In the states I shop for "Medium (M)" clothes. Hmmm.
I didn't know this beforehand and you may not know. Since November last, all ATM cards now work perfectly worldwide without the need for Cirrus or whatever on the card. Handy.
We went to the blue man group - actually I did blog about that - and they are awesome. If your in Boston - go go go go go! What entertainment. Laugh till you cry. Unless your a miserable old battleaxe like the lady behind me who wouldn't pass forward the toilet roll...
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