I am infested

Head Rambles Posted on by 14

I am beginning to wonder if I have actually been a Lurgy victim.

I read an interesting piece yesterday which made a lot of sense. The main points are that the Virus is nothing like as bad as they like to make out, and that it is also far more widespread than they like to admit. Many have had it without even realising it. Most are asymptomatic.

So why do I think I might have had it?

For a start, when they introduced their draconian restrictions I more or less ignored them. Tell me I’m not allowed do something and I’ll do it simply because I refuse to be bullied into anything. I’m a bloody minded fucker. I spent the last few weeks driving back and forth to a Dublin hospital which was well beyond the 2km limit [Herself announced this morning that apparently I am now allowed travel more than 2 meters from home]. Visiting the hospital was in itself a “risky” activity as I was deliberately heading into a location where I knew the Virus was. Their “social distancing” is just plain anti-social. Dancing out into the road because there is someone walking towards me on the footpath is just daft. We have had several family visits which included hugs from the Grandkids. The latter is something I will not be denied. I washed my hands when they were dirty as I have always done: in other words not every five fucking minutes. T o put it plainly I lived life as I always have and had loads of opportunities to get infected.

Then there are the symptoms.

For a while I had a dry cough which was fucking irritating and sore and kept me awake at night. This was accompanied by a very severe fatigue [not helped by the rough nights] where I was even too knackered to boil a kettle for tea. There were various other flu-like symptoms which were like a flu without the fever. I should add that I have a very strange temperature control system where my normal temperature is below average and rarely rises even to to “normal”. I can’t remember the last time I had a fever that could be detected with a thermometer.

There is also the fact that I’m a smoker. Heh!

So have I or haven’t I had the Virus? The only way to be sure is to be tested.

But frankly I couldn’t be arsed.

A gargantuan excuse

Head Rambles Posted on by 5

I had a nightmare last night.

This is not at all unusual and as usual the nightmare involved being back working in RTE. It’s funny how the majority of night terrors still involve RTE?

Anyhows, this was a simple one. I dreamt I had to return to work tomorrow and I blame this entirely on the meeja who are now endlessly waffling on about “easing the lockdown”.

The bad part of the dream wasn’t so much about the return to work though. In this imaginary landscape that aspect didn’t seem so bad [which was strange and quite unusual].

No. The nightmare aspect was the sudden realisation that I would have to come up with some really plausible excuse as to why I hadn’t turned up for work in the previous twenty years.

I’m damned good at excuses, but I’m not that good.

Euroderision Song Contest

Head Rambles Posted on by 8

So they cancelled the Eurovision shitfest but it’s on tonight?

Not on, but on?

It brings to mind the statement by one of our Great Politicians, when asked about the legality of imposing identity cards she replied that they were mandatory but not compulsory. Right. That cleared that up then.

Anyhows, it appears that they are determined to run this annual “entertainment” but without the only marginally interesting bit – the scoring.

Ireland is spectacularly bad at this competition. Right from the start they failed to grasp the simple rule. The point of it is to come in in second or third place thereby holding the entrant’s honour. Coming first was a great mistake as that country then had the white elephant of having to host the contest the following year and running the risk of bankruptcy. Ireland won it a few times in succession [to the delight of all the other broadcasters] before discovering the error of their ways. They then went to the other extreme and got eliminated every year which was equally embarrassing.

To my way of thinking, there have only been three winners. Abba and Riverdance both went on to cash in and make careers out of it [and Riverdance wasn’t even an entry]. The other was of course Dustin the Turkey who was so spectacularly cringe-worthy that it brought embarrassment to a whole new level and therefore deserves mention.

I won’t be watching tonight. I haven’t watched it since Terry Wogan stopped his great commentaries. I shall occupy myself with my annual preferred activity –

Poking my eyes out with a rusty needle.

Hang the expense

Head Rambles Posted on by 2

I wasn’t let visit Herself when she was in hospital.

Bloody Virus!

Anyhows we were effectively incommunicado until her cell mate started lending her a mobile.

She has several phones of her own. Her favourite got drowned on a previous hospital excursion, so I tried to get one of the others working. No fucking chance! One doesn’t work at all while another works in a weird way – it takes an absolute age to find a network and then insists on connecting to Meteor. I don’t know why as the SIM is an O2/Three one but it refuses to connect to them. It can receive texts but phone calls invariably fail.

So I decided to buy her a new one.

I went into the Three site [as I use them for mine]. I found a grand wee phone that was about as basic as they come. Herself refuses ever to touch a “smart” phone as she hates them. This one was under €90 where some of the other phones would require a mortgage. Also they promised a next day [or maybe the day after] delivery which is what I needed.

I stuck it into the basket. I went to the checkout. The site took some of my details and when I went to pay the fucking site just went to a blank white screen. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Just a sea of white. Fuck!!

The next day I tried again to see if they had fixed the site. This time I added a new SIM to the order which bumped the cost by a few quid.

Again the fucking cunting site went to the white screen.

I tried once more and gave up. I decided to phone them.

Of course their phone system had one of those damned menu things but no mention of problems with shitty websites or even sales. I pressed numbers at random. It told me that there was a bit of a queue but my call would be answered in about ten minutes…..

After nearly an hour the call was answered. The girl apologised and said that she had the order all right and said it would be shipped immediately.

That was nearly three weeks ago. In the meantime, Herself is home somewhat negating the need for a mobile.

Yesterday I was messing with my phone. I went to check my bank account. Three had debited me for €300!! What the fuck? It seems that on each attempt to order, the site had taken my money but hadn’t put the order through. So I was €300 down and still no new mobile.

Now I wasn’t going to try phoning them. They only had a couple of numbers and both just ended in the interminable menu and wait. They offer a Chat system which is also automated and provides totally irrelevant options and no “Other”. Fuck off.

I eventually found another chat area. I stuck in a “Howya” and waited to see what would happen. “Peter N” answered to my surprise and asked what my problem was. I told him the lot, how their site kept crashing yet kept taking my cash and how I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a mobile. The chat went on for quite some time while he chased things down and asked additional questions. We became quite pally in the end.

He has cancelled all three orders [that never went through anyway] and has requisitioned a refund to my account for the full sum.

I’m still waiting.

A quandary

Head Rambles Posted on by 10

A while ago I was messing around and installed some software on a server.

It’s a sort of analytics thing that measures traffic to websites. It’s like a concierge who counts the people entering a house, what rooms they visit, what they nick while they are in there and where they go after. At least it doesn’t flog that information to others like the Google yoke.

It is a lot more powerful than I first thought and as some nice, simple features such as a single list of sites and how popular they are. I hooked it up to a few of the sites that I run. Immediately I saw which were the popular sites and which got very little visits.

I took a snapshot that covers a few days.

Click to embiggen

Okay, so I host a lot of smudgy sites, but that’s only because I smudged them. Client confidentiality and all that shit.

The first thing that struck me was the traffic to Anna Raccoon’s archives. I was delighted with that.

Next was Martin Scriblerus. Again, a respectable placing in the league, as I suspected it would be.

The surprise was “A Pipe and a Keyboard“. That site is outdated and abandoned. I do use it very occasionally myself to refresh my memory on some point or other but I didn’t think anyone else would. One of the reasons I ran the comparison was to see if I could delete the site altogether. Maybe it should stay?

I was a little saddened at how far down “Smoking – on Ethics” came. I suppose I could merge it with Rambles into the Smoking section? That would release the server anyway.

The sad note was at the bottom of the table. Nisakiman’s site is more or less gathering dust down there. Yesterday it had three visitors and all three shot out of the site as soon as they got in. They didn’t hang around to read anything anyway.

So do I delete the site? It would seem like wiping Nisakiman from history, but it is nearly two years since he went to the Great Smoking Room in the Sky.

To delete or not to delete? That is the question.