For very many years I have resisted the temptation to indulge in the PDA craziness that has gripped many of my more geeky colleagues, including my brother and my new flatmate. I figured that "Fully functional PCs about that size will be out soon, so just hold your horses there son".

Of course I didn't say it quite like that. I said it like a person sporting an outrageous French accent as it happens but that's just my way. I have a rich inner dialogue.

And I was happy with these basic ideals until last week, when my flatmate went shopping for a new charger for his iPAQ and came back with a completely new iPAQ. A price difference of some 365 euros.

So he came home and this "used iPAQ, one good owner" literally dropped into my lap.

Now the iPAQ runs Windows Pocket PC edition, which, I've got to say rubs me up the wrong way - don't worry, I'll indulge in anti-Microsoft polemic soon enough I imagine, but aside from the Fischer-Price silliness the PDA itself is a good concept. So far I've played some solitaire, listened to mp3s and WMAs, watched an episode of Stargate, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, (ones my flatmate had already), and am looking to rip old videos I have of Gorky Park and a documentary about Bladerunner down to real media.

I also have the text of my current writing project, some PDFs, ScummVM for playing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and soon, hopefully, will be able to update my blog by using my mobile phone (US: cellphone, Deutsch: Handy) as a GPRS modem.

It's really quite an enabling little dohicky.

So, in spite of my worries that I was getting rigid and immovable in my old age ( in terms of thought and opinion, I've already established that I'm getting physically rigid and immovable), my opinion of PDAs is.... swaying. I'd still like an OQO but I'll more than manage in the meantime.

Now, let's see about some more storage...

And that little fragment of German dance-pop from Scooter serves to highlight the fact that I have actually just changed my realworld address. Or rather, I'm in the final scenes, before the credits, of the TV movie that describes my moving experience.

Well, Daire and I were both in the same situation of get-the-hell-outta-here with respect to our previous tenancies, so since we have similar tastes and can stand each other's company rather well, we've decided to share an apartment.

Luckily, we have similar taste in apartments.

Obviously we weren't going to get anything like that.... or were we?





No, we weren't, but we did get a lovely top floor apartment in a 4-floor building, with very generous space in both bedrooms and the main front room, a balcony, and all mod cons.

The building is called Lindsay House and many of my readers will get the beautiful symmetry in this.

The apartment is directly across the road from St. Patrick's Cathedral, just down the street from Christchurch, so it's very central. And it's just round the corner from a Garda station, so the area is very quiet.

And there's a beautiful park next to the cathedral, so we can take potshots at sun-bathers with BB-guns from our balcony!

Or.... maybe not.

At last, we shall have our revenge! At last we shall reveal ourselves to... Mrs. Gladys Prune, of #3 Skeffington St. Scunthorpe.

Question All Authority

Things i'd love to hear on TV;

• "Day 15. After brutally killing the two slowest members of the Big Brother house, the alpha males start posturing to gain the sexual favour of the females."
• Blair: We promised education would be our number one agenda and we have stuck to that.
  Paxman: I'm sorry, but that's complete Bollocks.
• Welcome to Kirsty's Home Videos. Well, we've nothing to show you, because the general public realised how unfunny it is to watch somebody get crunched in the nuts. So, sorry.
• And coming up next on Sky is another shite series that takes the budget Fox would have given to a good series that got cancelled.
• And coming up next on ITV is another so-called drama series where the protagonists are edgy, or bitchy, or edgy and bitchy.
• And coming up next on RTE is another badly acted/directed homegrown drama series that "says something about being Irish".
• And now, an hour of soft-porn, dressed as family entertainment.
• We took over 6000 hopefuls from around the country and whittled them down to 0, just to see them cry.

It'll never happen though. Time for more DVDs.

My mate Lynn is educating me in the ways of Anime. I find the sci-fi and straight fantasy films fascinating, but the ones that feature the male characters spending much of their time trying to get it on, and the female characters being either coquettish or over-tolerant - meh. It's all very Japanese, but, let's face it, in general japanese culture seems to be very sexually repressive. So much so that by their teens japanese kids seem to want it so badly they just explode in a riot of sexuality.

Or maybe that's just the anime. I suppose I can't really say until I go there. /me looks at ticket prices.

There can be nothing more bewildering than seeing 3000 people simultaneously playing air guitar. This was possibly the most memorable image from Friday last in the Point Depot.

See, Eric Clapton was playing.

And truly the man is still...er... the Man. He must be pushing 200 at this stage ( or whatever, sixty...) but he still has the blues at the core. There was a lot of showmanship and a lot of skill, and a helluva lot of passion about what he was playing. Whatever It is, he hasn't lost It.

What surprised me was the demographics of the concert-goers. There were about as many people my age and younger as there were people dancing that way you have to when you're over forty - I think it's in the rules or something. Hell, there was even a goth chick and her nu-metal boyfriend up near the front.

Possibly the most ironic memory from the show was seeing a bollock-load of estate agents, chartered accountants and area managers shouting "Cocaine!" at the top of their lungs. On Dublin's docklands.

And about the title; when Clapton was in his hey-dey in the sixties, young aspiring musicians were spraying the words "Clapton is God" on walls all over England. Some years later someone wrote into Guitarist magazine, asking "If Clapton is God, is David Icke lying?".

10 points to the first person who can figure out why people were wandering around the gig with t-shirts that read "Derek is Eric".

Two Words;

Puppet Angel

I am still, metaphorically, rolling on the floor, laughing.

Sun waves goodbye to 3,300 staff
By Drew Cullen

Posted: 02/04/2004 at 14:02 GMT - courtesy The Register

Sun Microsystems is firing 3,300 staff to bring costs into line with turnover. This will be a bitter pill to swallow for a much restructured workforce which today saw its employer trouser $2bn in a peace settlement with Microsoft

So, after years of pitched battle with Redmond, Sun have, so to speak, made a deal with the devil. Undoubtedly, they do better than Microsoft out of this arrangement, but I've got my eye on the layoffs more than the peace deal, for obvious reasons.

Whoever's around for drinkies, gis a call.

These sentiments do not necessarily reflect those of Sun Microsystems Ltd.

*****************URGENT REMINDER!********************

Hello,
As announced earlier this month, all free email accounts will be closed shortly.
Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control we find ourselves unable to continue this service after 30 March 2004. At this time the all accounts will be closed and inaccessible.
We urge you to transfer any important emails to another account and inform your friends, family and other contacts of the new address as soon as possible.
We hope you continue to visit NME.COM for the world's best music news, features, reviews, pictures, video, audio and competitions.

______________________________________________________________ For up-to-the-minute music news, reviews and specials visit http://www.nme.com
Get free e-mail (anyname@nme.com) now at http://www.nmemail.com
The sender of this e-mail is NOT an employee or associate of NME, nme.com or any other IPC magazine.

So, I'm desperately casting around for a free email account that'll do filtering and auto-forwarding. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Now I've got to try and remember all my vital subscriptions and change their addresses...

I particularly love the line that advertises free email accounts in the above mail. Tactful.

It was a day like anyother day. Except, and I realise I'm cutting to the chase with little or no preamble here, this day involved finger-crushage from a 82kg storage array.



Ow.

I have never. Erm, I had never screamed in my life. Up to this point. I had been trying to find the asset tag (by which the company records all it's capital assets in one large database which doesn't exist), and some fuckwit had stuck it on dead-centre of the top surface. This is a rack mounted unit, so I had to slide the unit above it out almost half way to get at the tag. On it's way it slipped off the left-hand rail and squished my digits.

And I screamed. That wide-eyed I-can't-believe-this-is-happening scream you see in movies. My knuckles, now completely supporting the storage device felt purple, and I knew that if I left them in there for very much longer I may lose them. And it was my left hand. And I'm left handed.

I was in a noisy lab however, with only the servers and SUTs for company, so nobody came dashing to my aid to remove the storage device from my hand. I attempted to lift the device off my hand with the remaining one, but that wasn't going to work. It required two of us to put the thing in there in the first place.

In a brief moment of calm I ran through the options;

1. I could leave it there until someone comes to help
2. I could try and pull the hand out from under the device
3. I could ... do something else.

Options one and two had to be rejected, which left me blank. Until I saw a screwdriver, almost within reach. I stretched as far as I could and managed to draw the screwdriver towards me, and then in one swift movement which surprised me, I stuck the end of the screwdriver into the gap next to my hand and levered the thing off my knuckles.

I fell onto the floor, gasping as blood started to flow around my joints again.

In no time at all, a colleague was driving me to St. Vincent's A&E, where I spent 9 hours waiting to be told what was what.

The damage? Bruising, thank Bob. Two days out of the office. Some stiffness, tenderness, nothing more. I was told it would have been considerably worse if I'd left it in there for longer.

So next time I wave my little wave at you, just remember, that there's a certain amount of luck involved in guaranteeing I'm able to do that. And smile.

http://www.beerdisappear.com

Thank God. I was just about to go nuts without some of the verbal stimulation alcohol gives, y'know, at it's handiest at about 3pm. Especially when you're talking to GDAs on the phone.

Caffeine will only go so far.