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.

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.

Ok so online social networking is a fantastic idea. Great innovation of the internet but today it’s ugly side rared its head, in the form of some bollox.

I’ll tell the story in brief, some twanger, for want of a better word, decided to make a clone of my sisters bebo profile. Signed up to a bunch of groups and posted on her friends profiles, or at least the ones he/she could access. Thus trying to sully her image and making her friends think it was her posting distasteful comments etc…. (only the profile name differed slightly).

So I’ve had to call her late tonight thinkin her account had been accessed by someone else, until I relealised that it was another account completely. Apparently calling me “the worsf brother” was the best he/she could come up with. Anywho, after all was figured out, got the account banned on bebo, and fair play to the bebo abuse crowd, less than 3mins for a response and account closure. If they’d be kind enough to give me some IP address, I could work from there myself, but I doubt it. Anywho 130+ friends profiles check and messages left for those who had been commented on by the bollox.

Anywho this leads me to my point, make your profile private, well unless you’re out there for dating or whatever, just be prepared that some fuck can pretend to be you. I never bothered switching my own to private, saying that I never thought somebody would be pathetic enough to make a complete copy of a profile.

That is all.

I normally don’t buy broadsheet newspapers, or newspapers at all (usually nothing but cack in them), but today while getting breakfast in Dunnes, I decided to pick up the Sunday Independent for the story on Irish Nationwide, not the heading “One cigarette is the price of oral sex in UCD”. Anyway besides the main heading for a broadsheet being about students and sex, there were some interesting articles.

Well anyway, to my point. The Sunday Independent costs €2.50, however if you’re buying in the North, it’s £1.40. Using XE.com €2.50 is £2.02, so why is there a difference of 62 cent? We’re constantly hearing of things being cheaper in the North, even our own papers “Irish” papers, are being sold cheaper in a foreign currency. This is nothing new, although we’ve mainly being hearing about it the other way round, the clothes and goods both tagged in sterling and euro having massive differences.

So on that note, it’ll be the last time I buy the Sunday Independent in the South, feck ‘em anyways.

Also I’m off to buy a pack of fags, to UCD!

So you’re browsing on ebay, you happen to see an ad or search for perhaps a plasma tv and the first link that comes up is a nice shiny “PHILIPS 50″ PLASMA TV 1080p HD READY” for the sum of €52, €62 including delivery. Guess what, it may just be too good to be true!

As I write this, the total number these TVs they had in stock was 330, it’s now down to 265. Guess what, these aren’t gonna be shipped, and that’s €3380 the scammer has made on these TVs, not to mention they have plenty of other high value products for the low low price of €52. They’ve got ps3’s, Nokia n95’s, wii’s, ds’s, laptops, gps, etc..

So why are people falling for this? One thing being, it’s advertised as being a Gardai auction. There are plenty of giveaways that this is fake.

• The main one being the feedback on the persons account. It’s all from people with zero feedback on theirs.
• The next giveaway is the first transactions on the account, they’re for babygrows… and a whopping €1 each transaction, from the same person too. Odd, I think so.
• Wording and spelling: , this a a great giveaway, “Genuine Gardai Auctions”, genuine on ebay means fake. “All goods fully country compatible”, I know what they mean by this, but it makes no sense the way it’s written. “Your Purcase”, maiow, spell check Isle 5.
• Another thing with the wording was, this is a Garda auction, i.e. the goods were recovered by the Criminal Assets Bureau, yet they have phrases like “reduced to clear”.

So all in all, this is a pretty easy scam to spot, yet the TVs are still selling. Only if people would just look harder rather than jumping at such a “great” deal.

I really don’t know if I feel sorry for people caught by this, I know to look at feed back, I know not to just glance over it when it’s such a great deal or rare item. But for the average Internet user, the exciting new world of online buying, holiday bookings, beboing, facefeck, “free” music, it’s very easy to be fucked over, at the same time, don’t expect something for nothing. (Maybe I’ll add ads to the site, I joke).

Personally I hope the scammers have their face kicked in, but I’m not a very nice person now am I? On a side note, I have reported the user to ebay and paypal, hopefully they’ll freeze the funds and prevent the guy getting the money.

Went to Ballymahon last Saturday night to the Bog Lane Theater to see Hamell on Trial supported by Spud Nigger, and what an awesome gig it was. The only downside was that I couldn’t drink feckin anti-biotics, feckin body not doing it’s job, rant rant, etc.. Not that I didn’t have a can of beer, than the very generous Spud Nigger members threw out to the crowd mid song! Yeah that’s right, where else does a band give you free beer? Anywho Hamell on Trial is pretty dam good, although by no means tame or for the easily offended.

The great thing about both acts was that they got the crowd going, there’s one thing to be at a gig and watching the show, but when you’re made be part of it, it’s even more fun, and that’s what everyone want’s isn’t it? Another thing, fair ball to Tadgh and Sean for the crazy punkesk hairstyles. Where else would you get away with a green white and orange mohawk when it’s not Paddy’s Day?

A quick bus ride back to Athlone, and it’s pub time. Myself and (another) Sean, went to the newly reopened 41’s. It’s more or less the same tbh, just a lick of paint, some new tvs, new bar staff, not too bad. I decided I’d have one pint, and in fairness I kept it at that and ran into a college friend (met very few of them out over the summer, odd).

So you’re probably wondering why the feck i’m telling you in detail about my night, I know I wouldn’t be interested, but there’s a point coming up, I swear, keep reading

For some ungodly reason, I agreed to go to a nightclub, bozos (club q bleh), ran into some more friends, and at this point I was drinking red bull, had some in Ballymahon too, and as the night progressed I had some more red bull, and more. Eventually I went home, buzzing like a fridge. Here’s the point I was talking about, don’t drink redbull. I got home and was as hyper, my housemates were still up, chatting away, and I joined them, jittering way, feet tapping, feeling like I could run a mile. so I eventually got to sleep, the next day, I felt like shit, worse than a hangover, I had a caffeine and sugar hangover. At least beer gives you actual energy, where the redbull just stimulates you and makes you burn your own engergy

So to sum that all up, feck redbull, have a pint. That was long and pointless, awesome

I’m back was away for a few days and in general just avoiding being online as much as possible. So frig all going on, back to college in September looking forward to that, well except for the crazy ass fees I’ve got to pay, over 3k

Word of advice, if you’re gonna drop out of college do it in first year, before the year’s over
I originally started college doing a Computing course, a Degree in Computing to be exact, course title changed twice while I was at it. Turned out to be too much business for my liking, I hate business, in the sense of that’s where I’d be heading. I’d like the option to specialise in hardware or software, but not just with business as my target area. I’d be finished college by now if I’d stuck at it, could be working in “business”, feck that. I want to be working with hardware, programming, fixing stuff, not be stuck in a help desk role for all my life, “your spreadsheet isn’t working?”, that in my head is where “business” gets you with computers.

Anywho this turned into a bit of a rant for no real reason. Ah well, all good then

Edit: Just got my form in for my college fees, turns out I made a mistake somewhere, it’s only costing me 2500 instead of over 3k, not as bad