Archive for October, 2007

I didn’t shoot Kennedy

Grandad October 26th, 2007

There is an old cliché that says that everybody remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot.

That is a load of b*ll*x.

I don’t.

I was young, footloose and fancy-free. I could have been anywhere. I could have been doing my homework, though that is very unlikely as I never did my homework. I could have been shagging Pauline from up the road [though now that I think about it, that was all in my mind at the time]. I could have been reading my brothers collection of p0rn that he thought I didn’t know about [that's quite likely].

Quite frankly, at that age I didn’t give a toss about America or American presidents. That was in the time before television rammed America down our throats, so the U. S. of A. was just somewhere people went when they couldn’t get a job. I know there was a bit of a faff when he came to visit Wexford earlier in the year, but that was the extent of my lack of interest.

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis all right, because we were all asked to pray for peace, and the world held its breath. I didn’t, personally, because I had more important things on my mind. Like sex. Testosterone was surging through my veins, and my number one priority was the fairer gender. World peace came way down the list.

I know I was in Ireland. But that’s not memory. That’s logic. I can even narrow it down to the eastern half of the country.

I know where I wasn’t.

I wasn’t in Dallas.

So it wasn’t me.

Net Visionary Awards

Grandad October 25th, 2007

I just received an e-mail.

Apparently I have been shortlisted for the Net Visionary Awards under the Best Blogger category.

Wow!

I am deeply honoured.

So it’s

Denise Cox - Newsweaver.ie

Krishna De - Oneocean Ltd

and Liddle Old Me.

Thank you all so much for voting. Even those of you who didn’t vote.

All I have to do now is find a black tie. They didn’t say what colour t-shirt or jeans.

And we’ll have to do without take away curries for the next two years, so I can attend the function.

It’s worth it…

Brainwashing a generation

Grandad October 25th, 2007

I am now being forced to watch Children’s Television.

I was addled this morning anyway, but now I’m in a state of complete brain death.

I am being force fed Sponge Bob. He is bad enough with his American accent and slang being pumped into the next generation, but it’s the advertisements that are really bringing me to the melting point of tungsten.

They are obviously winding up for the Big Spend Fest in a couple of month’s time [I refuse to use the 'C' word until December]. The stuff they are advertising is the greatest load of sh*te I have ever seen. And the f*cking prices!!!!

I haven’t seen one item yet that requires a concentration span of a goldfish. They are all tacky dolls that talk [providing you with a 'friend for life'] or dogs that talk and grow, or Barbies that [wait for it....] plug into your own MP3.  Every second advertisement seems to be a Barbie this, or a Barbie that, or a Barbie DVD.

To try to make the toys look exciting, the advertisements are full of noxious little brats, all saying “WOW!” in a hushed tone of voice. And the voice-overs are worse.

Will someone please tell me in which dictionary I will find the word ‘awesomest’?

I am now going sedate myself with whatever toxic substance I can find under the kitchen sink.

……….

Puppychild just raised an eye at me..

“Are you all right, Gwandant?”

No, I’m not, my little precious.

No, I’m not.

Today is one of those days

Grandad October 25th, 2007

I’m a bit addled in the head today.

I’m looking after Puppychild for the day, because K8, TAT and LaughingBoy have urgent matters to attend to.

Puppychild is the most adorable child. She is very funny and at that age where she can amuse herself. She has already come up with a couple of comments that have made me wet myself.

The only problem at the moment is that she has a book. She loves that book. It’s a book of fairy tales with nice pictures. There is a little button in the corner of it, and when you press the button it plays a little tune.

And the problem is that she insists that it is ‘bwoken’. It’s not.

But she keeps pressing the button and saying “it’s bwoken”, so that damned tune is playing non-stop.

It’s doing my f*cking head in.

I will have to grindle Linux

Grandad October 24th, 2007

I died today.

A bit ironic in view of yesterday’s title!

But they managed to revive me, you’ll be sorry to hear, and that is why I’m a bit later than usual in writing. However the story of my death can wait for another time.

-oOo-

Since I installed Linux the other day, I have been regretting it.

I have a habit of switching on the PC and then going off and making a mug of tea. Now when I come back, the f*cking thing is running Linux, and I want it to run Windows. So I have to reboot every time and wait for a menu to pop up. I then have about .0035 of a second to scroll down and select Windows.

That p*sses me off.

So I did a bit of research. Apparently there is a thing called Lilo. We used to have one of those for lying on on the beach. There is a file called etc/lilo.conf which I have to change. So I went looking for it. No sign of it!

I did more research.

The Linux I installed is called Ubuntu and it uses a thing called Grub.

Where the f*ck do they get these names? Are the people who write Linux high on acid or something? They have the most obscure names for everything. You don’t ’search’ or ‘find’ - you ‘grep’. And the desktop is called ‘Gnome’ or ‘KDE’.

I found the grub file and it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. It had been laid somewhere else. I opened it in Kate [I rest my case!] and found a block of lines that mentioned Windows. They were at the bottom, so I moved them to the top.

I went to save the file, and it wouldn’t let me. It said I didn’t have permission!

My computer that I bought with my money has the neck to tell me I don’t have permissions!

I have reared a child. I know about authority. So I told it in no uncertain terms, that if it didn’t let me write the file, it was going to be grounded for a month, and that I’d stick burnt matches in its USB ports and use the CD tray as a pipe rack.

It relented.

It let me write the file, and it now starts up properly.

I should think so too.

F*cking little upstart!

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Grandad October 23rd, 2007

There seems to be a rumour doing the rounds that I am dead.

My obituary even appears in Damien Mulley’s site.

The bad news is that I’m not. I know this will come as a shock to many of my loyal fans [like Bertie, Harney and Dubya] but that’s the way it is. You’ll just have to put up with it.

One interesting bit of mind-rambling I did yesterday was to take some figures off Google Analytics.

Apparently in the year, I had around 66,000 visitors. Each of them spent an average of three minutes on the site. So this makes a total of 198,000 minutes spent viewing the site.

I know you all view the site during working hours, in between sessions of poker, Facebook and searching for p0rn on Google, so this represents 3,300 hours of productivity lost.

I haven’t a clue what you earn, but you all have computers, so you mostly have office jobs, and must be reasonably intelligent, so I will assume an average salary of €15 an hour [I may be wrong - I'm way out of touch with these things].

This means I am costing the world economy €49,500 a year. And that is a first year, with a bit of growth to be expected in my second year.

So it would pay Dubya and Bertie [and George?] to get together and grant me an annual salary of [say] €50,000 a year to stop blogging. It would have to be index linked, of course.

Am I being unreasonable?

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