Having been employed now for almost a full three months I finally have for the the first time in almost four years some disposable income. On the cards for some time was getting myself a new PC as my main PC was starting to get a little old. After all it is 5 years of age now and creaking along the seams a little bit. I had a gander around at the main players such as Dell and HP et al and decided that price wise I might would be better off building my own one.

After poking about the usual sites I settled on a bundle offered from Dabs.ie made up of the following:

CPU: AMD Phenom II 1090T Black Edition. 6 Cores at 3.2Ghz.
Motherboard: ASUS M4A87TD EVO.
RAM: 4GB DDR3
HD: Samsung Spinpoint 1TB
Case: Antec Sonata III with 500w PSU.
Video: Gigabyte nVidia GeForce GTX460 with 1GB RAM.

The total came to just a shade under €700 including shipping which was bang on my budget. The parts had all arrived last friday so after a week of having it up and running I have to say I’m very impressed with the performance of it.

This is actually my first PC that has an AMD CPU. I was initially planning to buy an Intel Core i7 but from reading various reviews the Phenom II seemed to be almost on a par with the i7 I was looking at and was a little bit cheaper too. The motherboard and the CPU support overclocking too but I haven’t gotten around to trying that out yet.

Other factors that led me to decide on this combo was the motherboard supports USB 3.0 with four slots. It also has 6 SATA connectors one of which is connected to the eSATA connector on the front of the excellent case. The case with its 500w PSU is nice and big, easy to access with plenty of room for more disks with 6 x 3.5in drive bays. My plan is to start stuffing these to capacity over the coming months. Also the case comes with a front air filter which is very handy as I’m a smoker! The PC it’s replacing is rather filthy inside to say the least. Also the case has a nice large exhaust fan which is very quiet and has a switch to allow you to choose between three speed settings.

I also opted for just 4GB of RAM in 2 x 2GB modules in keeping with a view to upgrading in the future. My primary reasoning behind this was that Windows 7 flies along nicely on just 2GB of RAM and in keeping with my budget 4GB for the moment is plenty.

As always with a new PC the immediate performance is stunning. Over the Christmas holidays I intend on putting it thorough it’s paces with a few games that I am going to treat myself to but already I’m very pleased with my purchase

Anyone with any experience in a workplace will know it as a management buzzword that smacks of horseshit. When asked to define what synergy is you would invariably get the reply “1 + 1 = 3″

Not very helpful is it?

Synergy always annoyed me probably because like most people I didn’t understand or want to know the concept but it hit me like a ton of bricks over in the pub last night. Let me explain:

As it’s near christmas time, drink flows freely and occassionally a sing song might start up. Well last night one of three brothers started a song. When he was finished the second brother sang a song. This put the third brother under a bit of pressure to sing a song so he felt he has no choice so he eventually sang a song too.

There you go, Synergy!

1 brother singing + 1 brother singing = 3 brothers singing. 1 + 1 =3!

Now how to apply that to the business world without resorting to blackmail is anyones guess.

Number 1:

And number two:

The fossils themselves are of a marine animal that still lives in the oceans of the world today called Crinoids. Click for bigger.

And finally, and I never thought I would say this:

• Where is James Allen? Come back! All is forgiven!

Anyway all that aside, I have finally got around to sorting out some of the many photos that I took recently and here is one from Patricks day.

Two of the lads from Youghalonline preparing for their live webcast. On the left is Shane Supple and on the right is Kieran McCarthy.

A total of 5368 requests, in 3 hours!

Odd things is that none of the IPs in question were typical crawlers as each IP requested an entire page at a time.

Given that there is 7 IP addresses involved and they are all in sequence I would imagine that a single Verizon customer has something nasty installed.

Here are the IPs (which I have since blocked)

65.208.151.112
65.208.151.113
65.208.151.114
65.208.151.115
65.208.151.116
65.208.151.117
65.208.151.118

The user agent:

“Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”

Grep of my logs:

robert@cache:/var/log/squid# cat access.log | grep 65.208.151 -c
5368

Whois of IP:

MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business UUNET65 (NET-65-192-0-0-1)
65.192.0.0 – 65.223.255.255
Kintiskton LLC UU-65-208-151-112-D1 (NET-65-208-151-112-1)
65.208.151.112 – 65.208.151.119

Dodgy stuff.

Anglo Irish Bank’s annual report released today states that it loaned €451m to 10 clients that are now more commonly referred to as “The Golden 10″. As anyone can tell you, 450 million is a significantally more than the previous estimate of €300m.

And here is the kicker – €83m has been repaid and the bank are expecting to strike out the rest of the debt. 300 million gone just like that! 10 people who owe money to a bank that the people of Ireland now effectively own don’t have to pay any of it back and the Minister of Finance refuses to name them!

If one of us owed a red fucking penny to the revenue commissioners our names would be in the tax defaulters list of every national newspaper!

That stupid ignoramus from Co. Offlay claims it is in the national interests as the debtors are shareholders. Well if they are shareholders in the bank and they owe it so much money and won’t be paying it back take the fucking shares off them! And Mary Coughlan, when you said yesterday that it “would damage confidence in Irish banks” you can just fuck off back to Donegal and crawl back under the rock you crawled from. Are you actually that thick fucking stupid that you think that there already hasn’t been a serious loss of confidence in Irish banks?

That statement alone from Coughlan instantly proves you; Fianna Fail haven’t one iota of what is actually happening to the country. You seem to be so preoccupied with balance sheets and our standing in the international community that you seem to have forgotten about us. The ordinary people. The ordinary people that are losing their homes their jobs and the ordinary people who are ending up in prison because they can’t pay their television license.

Well, Brian Cowen, Mary Coughlan and the two idiotic green party lapdogs of yours. Let me give you a sound piece of advice.

Fuck the international community. At least until you get your own house in order because that is exactly what other countries are doing. They have their own problems too you know and they really couldn’t care about us at the moment. Or anyone else but themselves for that matter. And this is probably the right thing to do. We can all kiss and make up when this all blows over in a few years when we are all learning to walk again. And anyway what have you got to lose at this stage?

It’s a poisoned chalice but drink from it you fuckers. Drink long and hard and deep for the sake of those of us who have to live in the mess that you have created. Take it on the chin and get us out of it. And if that means calling a general election and losing control of government just do it anyway for all of our sakes.

We want someone to get us through this and time and time again you have proven that you are not the right people for the job.

Edit – Just to put things into perspective, €300m being written off the books is the the exact same as 1200 homeowners with a mortgage of €250,000.

So who is fooling who?

Strange.

“I know my DNS server was down for maintenence but I definitely recreated my DNS Zone.”

Quick check,

“Bugger! I forgot to add an entry for blog.sweetnam.eu!”

Oh well, I’m back now.