England and the US’s special relationship is still in place, but I have to ask, which one hasn’t got a hand up their ass?

On a side note, what country thinks they have a “special relationship” with the US, it’s complete BS, Ireland thinks it has one, half of Europe does, so how many countries is the US sleeping around with? It’s like a bad relationship, the US is the sleasy guy, getting what he wants by telling all the other women (countries) that they’re special, they only love them etc…. Time to wake up and smell the sluttery, it’s not very nice. Depend on your own merrits and not how well you lick a foreign nation. That’s addressed at Ireland.

Happy Christmas to the lot of ya, all 5 of you who read this

IT WAS ME, I WAS THE TURKEY ALL ALONG!

Now that all the exams and done and more or less the heavy drinking finished, I’ll be revamping the site hopefully before the new year, just more to mess around with the coding more so than anything, try out a few extras etc… gonna mess around with a whole load of add ons lets see if I can get productive. It’ll also help if I actually finish the dam site lol

Well think about it, it’d be awesome, well minus the killing people bit. But if it was something like evil aliens or a galactic invader of some sort, that’s “morally” ok to kill.  Since I was a kid I always loved the idea of robots, and giant machines to do our bidding. But what if you were that robot, the power of a fission reactor powering you, being able to sense for hundreds of miles around you, being able to link up with satellites to co-ordinate attacks against the enemy. All the time, weird techno, experimental music is playing in the background.

I want to dive head first into the throws of battle with the enemy, massive plasma cannon letting off burst after burst of superheated energy, cleansing the field of scum that oppose us. Swinging massive arcs of chaingun fire, crushing the hoards of chattering aliens beneath my feet. Then to go hand to hand in battle with an enemy equivalent to me. Feel the heat and hate radiating from its scaly armoured skin.

As it’s about to spit a volley blue flame towards my head, I clasp it’s hands, drop to one knee, roll while swinging it, then pushing it back towards its own forces, draw my combat knife, slice its head clean off in a spray of green/orange blood. It falls, crushing it’s own forces. Onwards, crushing the insects below, towards the next challenge.

When I grow up, I won’t be a battle robot, but I’d like to.

I need to cut down on the Warhammer 40K novels.

Sony. What a shower of *insert expletive*. A customer dropped in a relatively new (probably about 6/7 months old) Vaio. It had received a bit of a knock and it wasn’t booting to windows anymore, he tried repairing it himself with the built in OS restore. That aside, it semi-wiped the drive and outright failed then. Ok I’ve no problem with that, customers mistake, probably didn’t read the restore warnings, but he wasn’t too bothered about the data, just needed it up and running before leaving the country, or at least to know what can be done about it.

So anyway, I bring it home, try to boot up using windows disks to do a check disk. No joy, constant “Operating System Not Found” warning, despite setting the order of boot to cd first etc.. So fine, not working, time to take out the drive and check it. Hummm no bloody access to the hard disk! To get to the drive I had to take the entire laptop apart. What muppet in Sony designed this! What normally takes 2 mins to remove a hard drive took 20. I thought maybe they designed it this way to keep customers coming back to THEM for repairs, this is just a really bad design. No regular customer would be taking their hard drive out, so why do it?

I can’t just blame Sony for this crappy design, I’ve seen Fujitsu do it too but it was on their older models. Sony seem to be taking a cheap route in their laptop design and building. I hate badly designed goods, it couldn’t have been that more expensive to add an extra panel for easy access. At the very least it’d make it easier for their own staff to assemble, repair or customise laptops. The only reason I’m ranting about this is that Sony were the expensive, quality laptop, now they seem to be going down the Iqon route. I’ll rant about Iqon another time, actually I don’t think there’s a need. Anyone that has repaired, owned or used an Iqon laptop/pc knows how crap they are and how inept the company were.

rant rant rant

Anywho, besides me ranting about crap, I’m now older, kinda only copped it this morning, when thinking about finances for year 3 of college, may be able to get the mature student grant (if the country hasn’t melted by then).

Gonna try and keep this up to date a bit more, preemptive new year resolution. Anywho back to work and study, exams Monday, fun fun…

Ooo also blood update, got an email back eventually from IBTS.ie, the soonest I can give blood in Athlone is… January. wow

Edit/Update: I withdraw my insults about Iqon, while they’re still crap, they can’t beat HP’s wonder Pavillion DV series. Yesterday I recieved yet another DEAD Hp Pavillion Dvxxxx, I’m into the double digits of these laptops that decided to roll over and die. Main cause of the problem seems to be the Nvidia graphics chip, requiring an entire mainboard replacement. Guess what? Most of these laptops I’ve dealt with are out of warrenty and some aren’t covered by the limited add on warrenty hp offered. A total recall of these units should have been performed. I’m offer repairs on a small scale, I wonder how many hp have recieved of these? Also good luck with their tech support staff, not in warrenty, you have to call a premium rate number, then you have to pay for the mainboard replacement, despite it being a widespread fault. Way to go HP, you now take number one position on manufactuers I hate.

Laptop manufacturers listed by hate:

1: HP - For faulty hardware

2: Iqon - For no driver support / no customer support

3: Sony - Bad design

4: Fujitsu Siemens - Selling loads of cheap laptops with Celerons

5: Dell - Feckin Indian tech support, your last name isn’t Smith, it’s something with 6 syllables, don’t lie to me.

I know I do. I’m even trying to give it away, but with no luck. Numerous times I’ve tried to contact the IBTS online, all have failed. I’ve tried to locate somewhere to give blood in Athlone (fairly big town and population), the next time they’re around is January (I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a while now). They even had a text alert service, which is no longer available, it also never worked. The next thing I’m going to do is call them and see when they’re around next, surely it has to be sooner than January. The frustrating thing is, I’ve emailed them and received no response, they’ve been crying out for blood recently and yet I want to give but can’t.

What’s the deal?

They could be short staffed, fair enough, they could be having technical problems, again fair enough. But this has been going on for months now, every now and again I remember that I want to give blood, have a look, no donation areas in town, no text alerts, no email.

Just seems pointless to be asking for it, if they’re not going to collect in big areas.

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh

And that sums up my day so far.

I need a different job, one where I don’t have to deal with just anybody, I’d like just to have to deal with one set of annoying people instead of all of them.

The title post was intended to be ironic, so don’t be jumping on my neck, it’s too shiny for that.

Anywho, the reason for this post is the astounding lack of manners from my generation, below and some above. I know now that I’m going to turn into one of those old men who look and tut at the younger generation as they beat and drink themselves stupid while swearing at each other, But well feck it I’m on the way there so why stop.

I work behind a desk, in a shop, in a town. Not a single day goes by, where someone points at something that they want without uttering a word, not to mention the lack of please or thank you. I’m talking about coming into the shop, staring at me, pointing to a computer and sitting down. Then there’s the twats who wander in, grunt “computer upstairs” and wander up there without allowing time for me to give them a number. It’s as if people expect to be waited on hand and foot because they’re a “customer”, I don’t know if it’s just me or society in general, but where the hell have manners gone?

Now I can’t tar everyone with the same brush, I do have quite a few people my age and below that ask politely, don’t even have to say please, it’s just the manner in which it’s done. I’m not asking for everyone to be verbal in their politeness, just a little bit of manners like waiting in the queue, not cutting in front of someone, not cutting in on the conversation while I’m trying to deal with or help someone, not tutting loudly because the person in front is taking more than 5 seconds to pay, yes you’re wearing a suit, but it doesn’t make you any more important.

I’m starting to feel old and grumpy. I don’t like it, but I certainly don’t think it’s acceptable for society to lose its veneer of civilization, wasn’t that the whole point of evolving and culture to better ourselves?

I’m well aware that I’m not the pinnacle of polite/cultured society myself, I swear (a lot) and enjoy dirty jokes, I enjoy watching TV and drinking beer.  The difference between me and the people I complain about is I won’t answer my phone while dealing with someone that I’ve engaged, i.e. a banker, barista, shop assistant. I’ll say thank you when I’m leaving, I don’t throw my wrappers or rubbish on the ground, it’s how I was raised. I’m polite, overly polite at times, but this brings me to the point of my rant. Why does modern society appear to be coming mannerless?  Was it always this way and we’ve never really changed? Maybe I’m just whining too much and should become less polite to people if they’re not willing to show equal respect. Or maybe it’s time to burn the cities down and start again.

Anywho, old man Rob needs some coffee so I’ll wrap this up.

Don’t be an ignorant mannerless twat. Thank you.

I really want one of these, visit the site, it’s well worth the wait. pomegranate phone

this is some great marketing, and it’s so shiny too