Congratulations to Tony and Saori on their recent wedding in Japan. And thanks for bringing me back some sake.

Normally this stuff comes in bottles so I was quite curious when I got these:

Click for bigger

I’m half way through the one with the pink flowers and it’s bloody lovely. I’m going to save the other two for another time though

I can’t handle my drink anymore. It’s a good job the Blog Awards are an annual event. I’m actually still feeling a little bit rough around the edges.

The hotel was fantastic, service was brilliant but the staff were a bit busy needless to say which is where one of my curious incidents that I mentioned in my last post comes into play.

Immediately after the awards most of us headed out to the bar as they were clearing the chairs out of the function room. I was absolutely starving and was in dire need to line my stomach before the party got going so I went on the hunt for some bar food. My hunger wasn’t helped either having seen Grandad and Herself tucking into a lovely looking plate of something. Herself told me they finished serving bar food at 10:30 so I’d better be quick!

So I galloped up to the bar and asked for the menu but sure enough the barman said that they had finished serving for the night. I checked the time, it was 10:33!

I pleaded with him that it was only just gone half past and could I just get a quick order in but he said no. However he did ask me if I was resident in the hotel for the night. I said I was and he informed me that they have a 24 hour menu for residents and that I could go and order something from my room. It would be €4.50 extra but I wouldn’t have minded that.

Then I had an idea. What if I ordered from the bar and had it delivered to the bar while still paying the extra €4.50?

For some reason that unexpected question almost cause his head to explode. I could see the cogs turning in his head for what seemed like a small eternity, his eyes kind of glazed over until he finally managed to tell me that I could only have it delivered to my room! Didn’t make sense to me especially as the kitchen is right beside the bar! What difference would it have made?

Anyway I made do with a bag of Taytos and a Mars bar from the vending machine instead so the lack of food probably goes a long way to explain the extent of my hangover.

Once again it was great to meet all of the people I did.  There was another odd little incident which again involved the bar but I think Bock might write about that one. It was a fantastic evening and well done again to the winners and of course well done again to Mulley for arranging it all. I’m looking forward to the next one already!

My final thank you goes to Bernie Goldbach and Tipperary Institute who really helped make my night.

Looking forward to seeing you all again soon!

Lots happened that I can remember and some parts are coming back slowly as the pain in my head subsides. I did manage to meet everyone on my like to meet list though and of course I met lots more people who I’m looking forward to meeting again. Despite having a camera with me for most of the night I didn’t take many pictures.

There were a couple of funny incidents that happened over the night. I’m going to have to write about them tomorrow I think because I can just about barely focus on my screen. Bock will probably write about one of them. It was something that could probably only happen here in Ireland!

Anyway here are some (bad!) photos to look at. I’m heading back to bed!

“Name 5 bloggers you haven’t met in the flesh before that you’d like to say hi to at the Blog Awards, say why if you want, link to them. They then, in turn, link to 5 bloggers they’d like to meet and so on.”

I thought it would be easy but sitting here with my thinking cap on it seems impossible as there are plenty of people I am looking forward to meeting there. But alas I have to pick five. Indeed two have chosen myself so naturally I want to reciprocate. So in no order I’m looking forward to meeting:

Will – Because as he wrote on his blog “He used to live near me and I never met him all that time. It tuns out our interests and situations were also similar (even started back in (different) college on the same date).”

Grandad – Because he Bock owes me beer!

Grannymar – Because I hear that she doesn’t have enough toyboys in her entourage yet.

Donncha – Provided he will be there of course. Employee of WordPress and reponsible for some fantastic photography.

And last but not least

K8 – One of the wittiest people who’s musings I have read and also responsible for probably the most poignant and striking post I have ever read or am likely to.

So in additon to the above I’m looking forward to night. I have my hotel room sorted or at least I think I have. (Mental note to self: drop mail to Bernie) So there will be much merriment as I won’t have to drive home. Yay!

Once set up I will look after maintenence etc. while they can just blog away. Naturally WordPress was my initial choice for their blog but after a bit of investigation and testing I’m now considering using MovableType, more for a change than anything else but there does seem to be some significant benefits as Michele at Blacknight can testify having migrated to MovableType a couple of years ago.

The person that the new blog is for is reasonably tech savvy as a user and would have no problems with using either, however would anyone recommend one over the other? It has been some time since Michele migrated to MT so I’m wondering if there is any significant advantage any more in moving away from WordPress? Which would you recommend or indeed what would you recommend?

Best of luck to everyone who was nominated. There are some excellent blogs there and I’m up against some rather stiff competition, I’m looking at you Grannymar, K8 and Will.

I’m just delighted to be nominated and once more best of luck to everyone and I’m looking forwarded to meeting some of you on the night..

Logo by Davy

Most of you know that I have another site that serves as my main website. It is in a bit of a need of a tidyup in places but I’ve just added another page to it with all three (so far!) of my panoramic photos. The one from this morning is the one in the middle. Have a look here.

We also met Mickey Noel Whyte and his brother Jacky. Both of whom are infamous for various reasons as anyone from Youghal can testify! Jacky is on the left and Mickey Noel is on the right.

A friend bought a new laptop for his son recently. Nothing special about the laptop, an Acer Extensa 5220 but quite nice nonetheless as a surfing, mail and watching DVD’s machine. They bought in mid April and it went kaput 5 days ago so he asked me to take a look.

Like a lot of new laptops it came with Windows Vista. That was almost enough to make me tell him to bring it to someone else but being the nice guy that I am I told him that I would take a look. I powered up the laptop and it went through it’s loading screen and then the screen went black. Then nothing.. Nada.. No disk activity of any sort.

Naturally my mext step was to boot it up into safe mode. It got as far as loading crcdisk.sys, did a bit more chugging and then nothing. I asked them was any new software installed and they said no. So I delved into have a look.

• I used the Acer utillity partition to check for problems and it found none.
• I used the Acer utility partition to do a system restore except it couldn’t because it couldn’t find a restore point.
• I used the Acer utility partition to check the windows partition and it did nothing.
• I booted up with logging enabled except logging wouldn’t work because it couldn’t get far enough into the boot up process to write the log to disk.
• I booted from Fedora 9 installed on a USB key and checked all the partitions and couldn’t find anything wrong.
• Removed hard disk and ran a virus scan and malware scan on another machine and no results.

It was just impossible to diagnose. No files in the System32\Drivers directory has been changed since April last and that would have been on it’s very first boot. I checked the Windows update log via Fedora and the only updates installed were for Windows Defender.

Poking about the net came up with loads of people with almost identical problems with various hardware combinations. All had varying degrees of success but most ended up having to reinstall. I even searched through the Microsoft support site and couldn’t find anything even remotely like a solution.

Windows bloody Vista just decided to stop working for no earthly reason. So the only option left was to wipe it and start again from the restore CD’s except I couldn’t. Because Acer don’t supply a bloody restore CD with the machine! That wasn’t much of a problem though because my friend asked me if I could install XP on it instead. That in itself was a whole other nightmare and it goes something like this:

1. Boot from XP CD.
2. Setup fails as it can’t find a hard disk hard disk.
3. Boot up into the BIOS and change ATA mode from ACHI to IDE mode.
4. Setup finds the hard disk and goes through its process.
5. I browse the Acer support site looking for XP drivers.
6. I find XP drivers and download them on to a USB key.
7. 45 minutes later setup is complete and I proceed to install the drivers.
8. Half the drivers don’t work because of hardware not being present in machine. Despite being the very drivers for this model laptop as advertised on the Acer site.
9. Try to find the exact drivers that I need and fail.
10. Boot up from Fedora USB key to use Linux to identify the correct hardware.
11. Download and successfully install most of the proper drivers for XP.
12. Cry with joy and then realise what time it is. It’s been hours since I started! Where did the time go?
13. Barebones OS installed on laptop. Proceed to install XPSP3
14. 20 minutes later everything seems to be peachy. Although audio doesn’t work all of a sudden WTF?
15. Remove Audio device from device manager, reboot and then windows installs driver for audio that was previously installed. Reboot.
16. Audio works! WTF?
17. Bluetooth doesn’t work. WTF?
18. Download all versions of bluetooth drivers from Acer site. None work.
19. Give up. The 12 year old whose laptop it is probably won’t use it anyway.

We can learn several things from my escapades today.

Firstly Windows Vista is the biggest, stinking, steaming pile of shite that Microsoft have ever foisted on consumers but we know that already.

Secondly retro installing XP on a new machine isn’t going to be all that easy anymore since it is becoming harder to find XP drivers for new hardware. So be prepared to have to suffer with Vista or just remove it and install Linux instead. I recommend Ubuntu.

Thirdly, before buying a new laptop or PC it is well worth checking to make sure that it comes with restore CD’s/DVD’s of some sort before handing over your cash. It will make life easier for when Vista will go belly up. And you can be sure that it will go belly up.

Finally, I’ve decided that as and from today I am going to go purposely out of my way to avoid Vista if at all possible.

Now it’s time for a stiff drink so I’ll be off then. I think I’ve earned it.

What a gig. Both of us were well impressed. The first time I used amazon.com was back in 1998 to buy their album American Water as I couldn’t find it anywhere in Cork. Tony had bought his copy when we were over in Germany so I never thought that they would have ended up playing in Cork especially as the main man was noted for refusing to go on tour.

Ironically while we were waiting for the doors to open we were approached by a German girl asking us did we know where Cyprus Avenue was. So while Tony bought an album of theirs in Germany, a German was going to see them play in Cork. Weird.

Seeing as I was the designated driver, alcohol was off the cards. This was a first for any gig that I have gone to over the years. It must be a sign that I’m getting old because it didn’t bother me in the slightest! In another sign that I’m getting old – my back was absolutely killing me from standing up. I couldn’t wait to get back to the car to sit down

Incidentially – I now know where the redlight area is in Cork as I inadvertadly parked my car there

There were certainly a few sick heads around here today after the christening but the whole day and evening went much better than expected. Thank you to all who came and helped make the evening much more enjoyable.

And a big thank you for all your cards and gifts and well wishes. It was a very memorable evening (although it got a bit sketchy towards the end!)

Of course the evening would not have turned out as it did without the trojan work behind the scenes of my mother, Sylwia and her mother, my sister and cousin who spent days planning and preparing. In short a good time was had by all and it wouldn’t have been possible without them.

As for himself, he was incredibly good for the day. He seemed to handle it all in his stride and only cried once towards the start of the ceremony. By the time it came for the water to be poured over his head he was actually sound asleep! After he was happy out going from person to person and was no bother whatsoever!

Steph wanted to see photos of himself so I don’t want to disappoint. It is hard trying to pick a good picture so I didn’t. I picked three instead!

First is Sylwia, Lucas and myself:

Second is myself and Lucas:

And the final picture is of himself with, (from left to right) My mother, Sylwia, My grandmother and Sylwia’s mother.

Once again, thank you to you all who made the day a memorable one.