December 2004 – Page 2 – Something Odd!

Oooer, that NCT feeling!

I brought my car down to the Blarney NCT center this morning and checked in and joined a lot of other worried looking guys in the waiting room. The tension in the room was palpable as soon as I entered, and when vehicles were driven into the test garage half the room stood up and stared intensely through the windows. I read about discovering new earths in National Geographic.. when else am I going to get half an hour to do nothing but read? The disquiet and oppressive atmosphere was lightened considerably by a 3 year old girl and her parents – the parents were worried, but their daughter was oblivious reading her animal book and chatting to her mom!
Finally, just before 9am a man appeared at the waiting room door, said my name and I followed him out. With a smile he handed me my shiny new NCT certificate. Yay! No need to worry about that again until 2007!

An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away

Not quite, but a fanciful idea. Apples are a good source of vital nourishment, probably worth keeping in mind when we’re stuffing our faces with chocolate and being generally glutonous!

Spam Spam Spam, Come on up and get your spam!

Here’s an updated list of recent spam to this list. It’s updated every few minutes so you can see a snippet of the spam that’s being deleted automatically here by Kitten’s Spaminator and diligent updating of keywords. Go wild!

I need to think about this a bit more. WPMU supports multiple blogs, run by multiple different people, all of whom can update their spam word lists. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a “I trust the following blogs” list so that spam words can be shared between blogs?

Slightly related, I started using PEAR Cache to cache frequently used database calls. Stuff like the “last posts” and other plugins now use that. It’s working very well and load on the server has gone down!

Oh, and when you’re updating to the latest CVS version of WordPress, a database table has changed. I ran the following to update my tables:
cd wp-inst/wp-content/blogs; for i in *; do echo "ALTER TABLE wp_"$i"_users CHANGE dateYMDhour user_registered DATETIME DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL "| mysql wordpress_db; done

Flying Home for Christmas?

The world’s airports are going to be thronged over the next few days with people returning to their families and homes for the Christmas holidays. Here’s a sight that lots of Cork people will be familiar with!

gingerbreadCPU.jpg (JPEG Image, 800×717 pixels)

First we had the USB Mince Pie, now the guys in Taiwan have come up with a gingerbread motherboard. Looks good enough to eat! Yummy! (Thanks Padraig for the link!)

Santa's Flying In!

Only a few more days left and Santa will be flying around the world. Here he is landing at Cork Airport for a quick look around!

Can I Speak With The Eircom Account Holder?

Just got a phone call…

Me: Hello!
Caller: Hello, can I speak to the Eircom account holder?
Me: Err, speaking.
Caller: Hi, my name is Laura and I’m ringing from Tele2 in Donegal and I want to tell you about our ..
Me: Haha, don’t bother, I’m not even with Eircom any more!
Caller: Oh! who’re you with?
Me: Ah, UTV Talk.
Caller: oh, we can’t compete with them, they’re one of the best!
Me: Yeah, goodbye!

* Names have been changed.

So, Go to UTV Talk for free calls at off-peak times to local, national and UK numbers, and use Telestunt if you’re ringing abroad or mobiles. Definitely the cheapest phone calls in Ireland!

Delicious Photography Links

Via Thunderbird’s RSS reader…

Too much of a good thing?

Back in the day, I’d get a CD and I’d listen to it. A lot. A CD was a considered purchase – if I was going to make the effort to go to the store and spend my hard earned money on it, it was going to be worth it. In the car, at the gym, at work, at home – I’d listen to it everywhere. The first few listens usually couldn’t be at work, because I’d be listening. Once my brain knew the album, then it could become soundtrack to whatever else I was working on.

I get that feeling all the time these days, although when I look over photographs I took only a few weeks ago I’m quite often pleasantly surprised at how fresh they are!

Get Langer into the Collins Dictionary!

Ray D’Arcy and co of TodayFM fame held a poll today to decide what word we, the listening public, would like to see in the next edition of the Collins Dictionary. The clear winner of the poll was the word langer! According to the Cork Slang Dictionary, Langer is defined as “A disagreeable person.” but can also be applied to a fool or idiot.
So, go login to the Collins Word Exchange site and submit “langer”!
After doing a quick search, looks like “langer” is already there:

Langer noun

Bernhard. born 1957, German professional golfer: won the US Masters Championship (1985, 1993)

But don’t let that stop you, looks like there’s already a discussion started on the site!
While I’m on the subject, check out the excellent langerland.com!
Update! Looks like we succeeded somewhat – it’s now in the “living dictionary definitions”: