Just Me

On Friday afternoon last, myself and Elly finally got inside what will be our new home. No we haven’t moved in yet, but we’re a lot closer. We got access to ’snag’ all be it without power or plumbing. Still, that’ll be another day out.

Essentially, we studied our new home from top to bottom looking for thing’s that aren’t up to scratch and with only a few minor issues to report, were very happy with our afternoons work. Well apart from the fact that we’d spent hours standing on hard concrete floors and were exceptionally tired as a result.

We also took the opportunity to measure some of the rooms so we could start thinking about where things would go and planning what we needed to buy to fit the spaces we wanted.  We nearly didn’t, we were so tired.

Once we got home (the rented home that is) I logged onto IKEA’s web site to download their room planner tool and plastered across the screen was the news that they were having a 21% off sale in all UK stores to celebrate 21 years trading in the UK, starting at 6am the next morning, running till midnight that evening. We did some calculations and worked out that if we went (what with the current exchange rate and the sale) items priced at £100 sterling would end up costing us about €100. You can’t argue with that value! A call was made to my youngest sister (long time IKEA fan) to see if she wanted to come, Alas too short notice for her.

We decided to get up early, Saturday morning and hit the road. Planning to use IKEA’s delivery service to ship what we bought to Grannymar and we’d get it from there once we had the keys to the new house.

Literally 3 minutes before we were going to leave my sister texted me, to let me know she was on her way, complete with people carrier. After a bit of a wait for her, off we set. The sister had removed all but 3 seats from the people carrier as well so we had almost as much space as a ‘Hiace’ in the back.

After trekking round IKEA for most of the day and meeting up with Grannymar in the process we finally headed to the tills, paid and left, heading for the cars. Packing commenced and for a while it was looking like not even the world Tetris Champion could move these ‘bricks’ around to get them to fit. In reality we couldn’t get everything to fit in the people carrier. Thankfully, Grannymar was on hand to take the excess items that wouldn’t fit, otherwise it would have been the returns desk.

So we got most of our purchases back to Dublin with us, Grannymar is storing the sofa-bed for what we plan to use as a spare room/home office. Thankfully it will fit in either my own or Elly’s car so it shouldn’t be to difficult to get it back to Dublin. Which is probably just as well because as I type it’s the only bed we own.

For the amount that we spent, we got an awful lot, enough bookcases to cover a wall, Dining table and chairs, a sofa bed, an armchair & footstool, Light fittings for almost every room in the house, a dressing table, a crockery set, a very cool magnetic spice rack thingy and a load of other little bits and pieces. Jaysus that sounds like I’m on the Generation game

As for the shopping experience, I’ll be generous and say that shopping in IKEA is unpleasant (if it wasn’t for the price I would never shop there again) I may post again about that, I think this one is long enough for now.

Wow! what a couple of days it’s been. Since last Friday morning, we (Elly and myself) have…

1. Snagged our future home
2. Discovered an amazing sale in IKEA Belfast
3. Been to IKEA Belfast
4. Bought 2 loads of furniture
5. And last, but by no means least, possibly even most importantly, been to my nephew/godson’s confirmation.

All in all it could be described as a busy, expensive and exceptionally tiring  weekend.

So seeing as how this blog hasn’t been updated in a while, I decided it was probably time to give it a wee bit of an overhaul.

So, I’ve upgraded WordPress and some of the plugins, I’ve even installed Donncha’s Wp Super Cache Plugin. but there’s more to come. so long as what I’ve done doesn’t explode first, Fingers crossed then.

Wow, is it really August since I posted last? Well, seeing as how I know the answer is ‘yes’ that’s a bit of a dumb question really.

Anyhow, how to start back? There is the old reliable ‘what have I been doing?’ format or the ‘ignore it and pretend it never happened?’ format (Well it’s too late for that one now) or how about the ‘come clean with the reason you haven’t been blogging’ format.

Well the last one’s easy, I didn’t feel like it. :p and that’s because a lot has happened in my life since last August. I guess that brings me into the ‘what have I been doing’ format but not for long.

So what have I been doing?

August was spent working, September was spent travelling all over Europe, October was spent visiting mum, November didn’t see an improvement for mum and she passed away peacefully at home on the 11th, December saw a Christmas of adjustment, January until now was in general a bit quiet and mostly about connecting with some old friends online, getting ready for the move into our new home, oh and I went to Creative Camp.

So am I likely to change my posting schedule? Well, let’s just wait and see

Thanks for this Gizmodo.

Seems I may have been premature laying all the blame on Fernando for Hungarogate ™ with the news that Lewis wasn’t following team orders at the start of the session.

As a result Fernando was a bit peeved. So he decides he can’t see whether there are white lines on his tyres or not and spends 9 or 10 seconds on the radio checking that the team put the right set on. As a result Lewis misses his opportunity to do a flying lap by 4 seconds.

Now all hell has broken loose, McLaren are once again in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, let’s not forget Lewis’s accusations of team orders in Monaco, Fernando’s accusations of favouritism, The whole spy mess and now Hungarogate ™. It seems to me what should have been a dream season for McLaren has turned into a nightmare.

Is it just me or are both drivers acting like a spoilt brats?

Eddie Irvine seems to think so and he makes some interesting points. I have to say, I agree with him when he says…

To block Lewis like that in qualifying was one of the most stupid things I’ve ever seen and it reminded me of Michael Schumacher’s move on Jacques Villeneuve at Jerez in 1997

I think Eddie managed to sum up what I found so offensive about this whole thing…

“I can’t condone cheating, but if you must do it, there’s got to be a subtler way!”

At least when Michael and Ayrton were caught they were trying to make it look like an ‘accident’

I can see where he’s coming from, I am starting to think that Lewis has been manipulating things when speaking to the press, but then what driver hasn’t at some point in his career. Still that bit of arrogance that’s starting to show is a sign of what’s happening at the moment and I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of it. He’s the most successful rookie of all time by a long long way and it must be so hard to resist being arrogant when you are in a class of your own.

Last Saturday, when this all went off, I thought that maybe there was a culture of cheating starting to build in McLaren, I now think it’s more to do with 2 giant egos battling to be number 1 in a team that will not publicly condone such a thing and despite the success they have had in the past they have mostly come when there has been a ‘natural’ number 1 in the team (sorry DC I love your attitude these days but you were never a match for Hakkinen, except maybe the day Ron ordered you to let him pass). Remember Senna and Prost? That ended well for McLaren didn’t it

I feel myself, it’s only a matter of time before one of the brats throws the toys out of the pram and does something even more stoopid (and probably dangerous) than what we saw this weekend. I really hope it doesn’t come to that but barring Ron actually names a number 1 driver I can’t see this ending any other way. The question is which one will it be, the young gifted rookie or the 2 time world champ?

Yeah, It’s monday and I have the day to myself, Elly has to work so I’ve got the house to myself. Now what am I going to do with myself?

Well I’ve already caught up on all my blog and news reading, my Google reader has no unread feeds left for the first time since I switched from Newsgator. although it seems to not want to allow me to add more feeds which is odd cause I know I don’t have as many as the likes of Robert Scoble but I can’t add anymore now

From my reading frenzy this morning, I see Grandad has Blognapped Granny’s Blog to wish her a happy birthday, the oul romantic! Well at least he didn’t head off tourist hunting for the day

Gizmodo seems to be getting less about the gadgets and more about the gags, these days, so much so that I hardly seem to read it anymore, could it be that the volume of posts is costing them quality? Surely not.

And Finally, over on the Blather Zeitgeist, Damien has posted a brilliant short film from Blur Studios, very funny and well worth the bandwidth and time it takes to view it.

So am I going to mow the lawn and fix the Media Centre PC today or just laze around the house all day and do nothing, It’s my day off after all.

I’m disgusted, Fernando Alonso, a two times world Champion, ignored his pit crew and sat in the pit box as Lewis Hamilton waited for a change of tyres and have one last crack at pole position. Fernando delayed Lewis long enough that he wasn’t able to attempt his last flying lap before the qualifying ended and took pole position from Lewis.

Shame on you Fernando, you have often criticised other drivers for tactics such as these and now you do the same! To your own Teammate? of course your counting on Ron Dennis not lodging a formal complaint, as it would compromise the team, your counting on Ron Dennis not feeling the need to ‘change your engine’ or ’start you from the pit lane’ or even firing you. It was obvious from the coverage that this was not planned and approved by the team.

I’m reminded of ‘Rascassegate’ at last years Monaco GP and Flavio Briatore’s comments in particular.

“Someone who was seven times a world champion wants us to believe that he didn’t do it on purpose - it’s fairyland.”

At least there could be some debate over Schumacher’s intentions, but, in my opinion, there can be no denying that Fernando sat still despite being ordered out of the pits by the team.

This all comes right in the middle of the whole Stepneygate affair and I have to say thing’s look bad for McLaren, they were found guilty of cheating, yet not penalised as ‘they gained no benefit’ from the information. I’m sorry, but cheating is cheating and unless some punishment is applied to McLaren even as a token gesture, I believe it calls in to question the impartiality of the FIA and it almost legitimises cheating maybe that’s why Fernando did it.

I’m sure there will be a lot of comment in the next few days/weeks regardless of what the outcome this weekend and in the whole spy thing, at the end of the day, it would be easy to say the only ones losing out are the stakeholders in the sport, as they are making a mockery of what has been an incredibly entertaining season in F1 for all the right reasons.

But I love F1, have done since I were a nipper and I’m a stakeholder in the sport, granted as a spectator only but it’s the spectators that the sponsors want to entice and it’s the sponsors that provide the funds for the teams and drivers to go racing. I’m glad I’m not a vodafone customer because I would now have to change phone companies, I’m glad I don’t drive a Mercedes because I would have to change it.

Yup, that’s how I feel about it right now. I spent some time with my blog today for the first time in ages. I upgraded to the latest version, installed a few plug-ins. I also tried to sort out my sidebar issues again, I had hoped that the upgrade might fix it for me but alas no

So I’ve been investigating and it seems that there is something in certain posts that is causing the sidebars to vanish from the page. There are a few common threads with these posts…

1. They were all written in Wordpress “rich text editor”
2. They all contain images
3. They were all saved as drafts and edited over an number of sittings

For now I’m just not going to use the Rich text editor, hopefully as I post more and the effected posts move off the front page the issue will become less prominent. I guess I’ll just have to live with it, until I work out whats causing it.

On the upside, the new plug-ins mean people can now digg my posts if they feel the need and I have some added colour thanks to the images feed. The new category cloud in the sidebar looks so much better than that horrible mess that I used to have and I finally have a functioning Spellchecker, I’m sure I’ll hear all about it if it’s not up to the task

It’s one of those things that bugs me about technology at times, it’s just not as simple as we’d like it to be. There’s a lot more going on with modern technology than most of us realise and it just doesn’t always do what we expect or want it to. That said It’s great to have the technology working for us… most of the time anyway.

oh jaysus, I’ve read about some weird/tasteless product idea’s in my time but this doesn’t just take the biscuit, it takes the pack, the box the pack came in, the delivery truck, the factory and the farmers that grew the grain.

Thanks Anthony… I think