Heart Attack Warning Signs

Self diagnosis can be a dangerous thing. I don't mind admitting that I can be somewhat of a hypochondriac sometimes. For example over the past few years I have thought at various times I had two types of cancer, lung and skin. I also thought for a long time that I was going blind.

With that in mind it is a good idea to be cautious about self diagnosis. There are usually innocent explanations for the symptoms you are suffering and usually a mole is just a mole.

Still though, knowledge is better than ignorance and it is good to know what the possible symptoms are. For example if you want to know if you are a Heart Attack Risk it is good to read up on the possible symptoms of it. If you have enough of these symptoms to start ringing bells there is still time to see a doctor and start doing something about it.

For the last day my little finger has been numb. The numbness started after I casually carried and swung a plastic bag full of groceries off it as I walked back from the shop yesterday.

The feeling seems to be returning to it slowly and this morning only the tip of it is still numb.

Since it happened I've been doing internet searches looking for possible reasons for this. So far I don't think it's anything to worry about. I think I've ruled out cardiac arrest. For now anyway.

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Memoirs of a Superstitious Child

I was an impressionable and superstitious child. I was aided in this by my mother who, despite being a devout Catholic and therefore not really believing in such things, nevertheless said that she had seen ghosts on several occasions in her youth. When my mother and aunt would get together they would sit and talk about growing up in the 1930s and 1940s.

Apparently there were lots more ghosts about then and my mother would tell how she had sometimes seen ghostly shapes of men moving along the road or staring through windows. She said that when she saw them she had never felt scared but instead felt sorry for them.

During this time there was a regular prayer said at Mass praying for rest for the 'Lost Souls'. My mother and aunt both believed that it was this prayer that had helped those ghosts to move on into the next life and that this was why people didn't see ghosts anymore.

In later years I have come to think that the spread of the electric light through rural Ireland during this period may also have been a help but at the time when I heard these stories I believed in ghosts. Even now sometimes in the dark of night I still get that ghostly kind of feeling that I used to get regularly as a child.

There were many things that I was fearful of as a boy. One of them was the abandoned house further down our road. I grew up in the countryside and our house and the old abandoned house were the only two on our road. Even in daylight I would be fearful of passing by this house, with its broken windows and overgrown bushes and trees crowding in around it. When I was passing by on my own during the day the only way I could do it was at a run. At night-time I just couldn't do it at all. The sensation of an unknown and terrible presence was just too much for me and I would get the feeling of something climbing up my back as I got close to the house.

Another things was vampires. One time I stayed up too late and watched a film about vampires. In this film the vampires were trapped inside books. I still remember one scene when a character looked into a freshly dug grave and saw a book at the bottom. He thought it was a good idea for some reason to jump into the grave to investigate the book. When he opened the book the face of the vampire appeared and started to materialise out of the pages. After I went to bed that night I woke up and saw the face of that vampire on my bedroom wall. I did not sleep well that night.

So when one day my sister brought a picture of The Crying Boy into the house I was more than uneasy. What made it seem worse for me was that she knew all about the story behind the picture. I know she knew because she was the one who told us about it. The picture was supposed to be cursed. In numerous houses in England where it was a popular print it had been all that had been left untouched in house fires. There were many reports of houses where the picture was hung burning down and The Crying Boy picture coming out miraculously untouched despite everything else being destroyed.

I couldn't believe that she actually thought it was a good idea to hang this picture in our house! I couldn't believe that my parents seemed to agree or at least didn't mind!

It would have been one thing to buy the picture and hang it up and then eventually find out about the story behind it. During that time you may have become attached to it and be willing to ignore the alleged curse and keep the picture. But to start off from a position of knowing about the curse and still hanging the picture was just unbelievable to me!

The picture was hung in our sitting room which was rarely used anyway except for around Christmas time. Because of its presence the sitting room became like the old, abandoned house to me. I was fearful of being in the room on my own with the picture. Anytime I had to go into the room for something I would try to avoid eye contact with the boy. Whenever I went into the room I felt that crawling feeling on my back. I felt like he was looking at me.

I had forgotten about all of this until I read the latest issue of the Fortean Times which has a feature on The Crying Boy story. It seems that the story was hyped up and publicised in the mid-80s by The Sun newspaper in Britain.

The Crying Boy picture was mass-produced during the 1970s and was very popular in parts of England. Therefore it wouldn't be surprising that it would happen to be in some houses that went on fire for various reasons. It was printed onto hardwood which is difficult to ignite and that is possibly the most rational explanation for why it was likely to withstand fires that might destroy other furnishings.

The story became popular after The Sun carried a report on September 4, 1985 about a chip pan fire in a house in Yorkshire. Ron and Mary Hall blamed the fire on the painting which survived unscathed from the fire which badly damaged the rest of the downstairs of the house. It happened that Ron's brother Peter was a fireman and The Sun reporter quoted him as saying that he was aware of several cases of The Crying Boy painting turning up unharmed in the midst of otherwise destroyed homes.

From there the story grew and grew and was happily spurred on by the editor of The Sun Kelvin McKenzie who said it was a story 'with legs' ie it would keep running.

It is years since I thought about the story. I never knew it's origins before. I didn't realise that The Sun was to blame for some of my sleepless nights as a child. What about 'Kelvin McKenzie Terrorised Me As a Child' for a headline?

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Why I'll Probably Never be a Published Author

It is one of my (day)dreams to be an author. This is one of the things I think about when I am at work staring into space in a daze. My problem is that whenever I do try to write is that when I can't get past the title of the book and the opening paragraphs I resume staring into space.

Becoming an author is not the get-rich-quick option it appears to be in my day dreams. Lots of work and dedication is required to produce a book and unfortunately I never learned how to Apply Myself. However, if you really want to Publish a Book and have enough belief in the project there is always the option of self-publishing. It may not satisfy the dream of the massive payday from the publisher but it would satisfy the other dream of seeing your book in print.

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The Englishmans Little Finger

I mentioned previously about Guy Wallace, the English teenager who claimed he was racially attacked on O'Connell St on St Patrick's Day by a gang of Irish teenagers who tore his little finger off. While some media sources jumped on this straight away as an example of racist behaviour by Irish teenagers others suggested that Guy's verson may not have been exactly how it happened. For one thing Guy was so drunk that he wasn't really in a position to give a very accurate account himself and no-one else saw this attack, apart from an incident in a take-away which he was able to get away from.

It was reported in todays papers that his finger has now been found, badly decomposed and attached to railings. It now seems that Guy caught his finger while trying to climb over the railings and the initial doubts about his story were correct.

It's not exactly a happy ending for Guy but it does help to remove the tarnish that the story could have put on the Irish reputation if it hadn't been disproved. I wonder what those expert plastic surgeons in England who said it looked like his finger had been bitten off now say. Meanwhile his family are backing him up saying that he had genuinely believed that that was what happened. In his drunken state he had mixed up earlier incidents and combined them to create this story.

Guys initial version of the story was that he had been asked his nationality by a group of people with old faces and thick Irish accents. When he confirmed he was English they beat him and held his hand against the footpath while one of them stamped on his hand and tore off his little finger.

As Roy the Taxi Driver commented on my previous post on this it appeared from Guys description of his attackers, old faces with thick Irish accents, that he was attacked by Leprechauns. The video above is an artists impression of how it might have happened.

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Why I Wouldn't Make a Good Cowboy

The mental picture I have of a rodeo is from the opening credits of Dallas. Possibly that image isn't too far off the mark. It's certainly a dangerous sport. One of the stars of rodeo, Wiley Peterson, is currently recovering from an injury. The latest news is that his collar bone is healing up nicely and he expects to be competing again at the end of the month.

While it is dangerous, there is obviously a thrill to be had in it both for the rider and the participant. The National Rodeo Finals are being held this year in the Thomas and Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nevada from December 4th to the 13th. National Rodeo Finals tickets are hot commodities already and going fast.

The video above gives a good illustration of the danger and excitement involved in rodeo. I was scared watching it! There’s no way I'd be able to get up on one of those animals! Last years NRF world champion winner, Wesley Silcox is 22 is one of the participants. As they say in the clip:

"They have that look of haunted need. It's a level of adrenaline that you can't get anywhere else. Riding a bull is not like any other extreme sport. It's the world's most dangerous sport."

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The Woman Who Tried to Book a Bus Ticket Online and Brought Busaras to a Halt

AKA BuyOnline Me Bollix

I was getting the bus from Dublin to Longford today from Busaras. The Busaras is the central bus station in Dublin and is like the head bus station of the whole Bus Éireann fleet. As such you would expect it to be fully equipped to provide every service that Bus Éireann promises to provide to its customers.

Funny therefore that the whole service ground to a halt because one of its customers decided to book a ticket online on Bus Éireann's web-site.

Before all of this, it was a little annoying when I was queuing to board the bus that a couple of girls at the top of the queue had chosen to buy their tickets on the bus. I, like (almost) everyone else had bought my ticket in the station and had it with me. All I would have to do would be to show it to the driver as I boarded the bus and that would be that. Everything would move smoothly.

As well as being annoyed I was also quite impressed at the humanity of the bus driver. The two girls were obviously lost souls that didn't know their way around the practice of boarding a bus. Another theory I had was that the queue at the ticket desk had been too long for them and they reckoned they'd get away with it because they were girls. I was a good way back in the queue so I wasn't able to form a proper impression of them.

I have often seen a driver just point towards the ticket desk and tell the poor unfortunate to join the queue to buy a ticket there. If they made it back before it was time for him to leave he would talk to them again. If not. Well, there'd be another bus in two hours time.

Once or twice I have been the one so pointed at, so when the driver condescended to sell them a ticket - and then waited for them to assemble the money to pay for it - and then searched and found them change - I was content enough to put up with this. It only took three or four minutes.

Imagine my relief though when this little hold-up to the queue was removed and the girls plus their newly acquired tickets walked down the aisle of the bus and took their seats.

It was a short-lived relief though when the VERY NEXT person in the queue after the girls with no tickets was the woman with an e-mail print-out.

The driver hadn't seen one of these before. He read it. Several times.

I hadn't seen one of these before either. Not for booking bus tickets anyway. E-mail print-outs are commonplace now for airplane flights where online booking is increasingly the only way you can make a booking.

However, there don't seem to be many advantages in booking a bus ticket online. Out of curiosity I tried it out tonight. The only advantage I saw with it was that I could have saved €2 on my Dublin-Longford day-return by booking online.

If you're a very well organised person you can book your inter-city bus ticket online five years in advance at todays prices which might add up to a reasonable saving. It is currently possible to book a bus ticket online for any date up until 31 December 2013. Provided you're organised enough to remember that you pre-booked your ticket five years ago and be able to keep your e-mail print-out in a safe place you could be able to save a reasonably significant amount of money by doing this.

But it's not even as if you're really reserving a seat though. Buses are still filled on a first-come-first-served basis. You could stand in front of the driver waving your e-mail print-out screaming "I booked this five years ago" as much as you wanted but if all the seats were already taken you'd still have to wait for the next bus.

It's a funny thing that bus tickets should be cheaper to buy online because it appears that processing the online bookings is costlier. According to the terms on the Bus Éireann web-site:

"Once your credit card details have been processed, you will be sent an e-mail
confirmation with a validation code. You must print that confirmation e-mail and give it to the ticket issuing staff at the Bus Éireann ticket office or to the bus driver before travelling on the bus. The ticket clerk or bus driver will check the validation code electronically and then issue you with the appropriate travel ticket in exchange." You are also required to have photo ID with you.

The lady in question seems to have made the mistake of reading all of this and believing it! She thought it was enough to show the e-mail print-out to the driver and have a bit of ID with her and that would be it. Instead the bus driver took out a massive red book resembling a Thoms Directory and started leafing through it. Apparently it was the Big Rule Book of Bus Fares.

Meanwhile everyone else in the queue stood and scowled. My emotions varied from boredom to annoyance at the obvious stupidity of the woman with her bit of A4 paper to the obvious stupidity of the driver for not just telling her to feck off.

After the bus driver had re-read the e-mail and the Big Rule Book of Bus Fares it was the turn of another bus official to have a look at it. And then another. After three people had looked at the e-mail, and as far as I'm aware no validation code had been electronically checked, the woman was allowed to proceed on her journey. As were the rest of us passengers. The bus was only 12 minutes late leaving Busaras.

Once again, let me repeat: this was at the Bus ARAS. The central bus station of Bus Éireann. If they can't cope with an e-mail here what chance do the ones in the sticks have?

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Thinking of Moving from Blogger

I see that Roy of IrishTaxi.net has moved from blogspot over to a wordpress blog. This seems to be a transition that most serious bloggers have to make in the end.

Blogspot is great for starting off. It has nice features for a free service such as the ability to point your own dot com address to it. Apart from that it is easy to use, provided you don't try to do too much messing around with the design side of things. But WordPress does have many advantages over it.

One is the selection of plug-ins that give greater usability to Wordpress. It's also much easier to back up a Wordpress blog. There is a wider and better selection of Wordpress themes also and as well as that I find that Wordpress themes are easy to customize. I find this myself. I may have only basic html skills but I'm able to do some editing of Wordpress themes with limited competency. Blogger themes are much more difficult to edit.

Once you move away from blogger you also need to find a good web hosting service. At the end of the day you'll probably have to pay for that.

I'm still window shopping at this stage. I'm in the early days of thinking about it but it does seem to be the best way to go in the end.

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Leprechaun in a Tree

The world really is a strange place. This clip here is a real news report about a sighting of a leprechaun in a tree in Alabama. I’m pretty sure it’s a spoof but on first watching you’d nearly believe it. It seems they really thought they saw it:

It was a good news report and it inspired an equally good rap:






This one, on the other hand, definitely is a spoof. The leprechaun in this one is excellent:

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Gandhi's Breakfast? Bingo!

I never really saw myself as a bingo player. But it was Good Friday and the pubs were closed so I was happy enough to try out a bit of online bingo to see what it was like.

While it is possible to play for money and there are some pretty impressive jackpots to be won in it a good way to get started is by playing free bingo. Bingo Port, the site I joined up on gives you 1,000 free points when you join up. You can use these points to purchase tickets in the free bingo games. The cards cost a few points each so you can get plenty of games for free.

If you don't have any luck winning more points playing the free bingo you can get more free points by a number of different methods. One way is to contribute to their forum. They give you 100 free points for every 'post of substance' that you post (ie 'LOL' isn't worth 100 points!).

The two free bingo games are 75 and 90 ball. The most straightforward one is 90 ball bingo. This is a simple game where you play to complete one line, then two lines and finally a full house. The other thing I liked about this game was that the caller had a very pleasant female voice.

The 75 ball game in my opinion seemed a bit more difficult. In this game you try to form patterns on your bingo card. Also the callers voice was a less pleasant computerised male voice which didn't help my enjoyment of the game. On the other hand the jackpots seemed to be higher in this game.

Once you accumulate enough points you can convert these into credit to use in other games and play for real cash prizes. It is possible therefore to play for free and win real money. Alternatively you can convert your free points into Amazon.co.uk vouchers.

In truth there isn't really much to do when playing online bingo apart from watch the computer tick off the boxes on your card. Or not. That is why there is an online chat where you can natter away with the other players. The chatters here use a lot of short-hand terminology so it might take a while to get used to it when you're starting off. On the other hand once you get the hang of it, it saves a lot of time typing!

My winnings almost balanced out my losses last night so I still have nearly 1,000 points to play with. I'll be back to see if I can win any more. The possibility of working up enough points to win real money might be enough to keep me interested!

PS. Most of the bingo numbers were straight forward rhymes or easy to understand but Gandhi's Breakfast was the one I had to think about the most. Gandhi's Breakfast? 80 ie Ate Nothing.

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Joy-Riding on YouTube

Surfing the web can bring you to some strange places. My latest journey on the internet began last night when I was checking my visitor statistics. I noticed that one person had found my site by searching for 'finglas st patrick's day youtube'. This was obviously someone looking for footage of the riots there on St Patrick's Day.

It hadn't occurred to me to go looking for footage like that but when I saw the keywords I got the idea to have a look myself. The only clips I found were short and poor quality, shot on a camera phone:

Snips From the Saint Patrick's Day Riots in Finglas






One of the good things about YouTube is that similar videos are linked to each other so, while the St Patrick's Day riot footage wasn't much use it brought me on to more interesting things. One of these was a gangster rap from a couple of teenagers in Finglas about killing a police informer.

I used to listen to a lot of rap by the likes of NWA when I was their age too. The lyrics of gangster rap are graphic and violent but hearing young lads with Dublin accents rapping in the same way makes it seem more real.

I have to admit to doing a bit of rapping in the privacy of my bedroom too when I was their age! It was a good way of venting emotions and I never actually killed anyone despite my violent lyrics. But then again I wasn’t stoned either unlike one of the fellas here. Hopefully they'll grow out of it but there’s a chance that they won't:

Gangster rap from Finglas




From there I moved on to joy-riding and I found plenty of examples of this on YouTube. Staying with Finglas this is one of a lad doing a wheelie on a motorbike:





Still with Finglas here's one of joy-riders racing on the M50. It's set to music and the production qualities of this one are quite good. It's a good clip to see things from the joy riders perspective. People may not want to do that but I always think it's a good idea to look at things from different angles and try to understand why people do stuff like this. In the case of joy riding it's done for the thrill of it, with no regard for the consequences.

I think it's telling the way they turn the camera to look at the cars as they overtake them. You can just imagine the scene inside the joy-riders car as they overtake each one. So while the clip shows the fun side of joy-riding it also unwittingly shows the anti-social aspect of it too. Part of the thrill of it is in disturbing other people and scaring them.

Incidently this could be another good argument for getting rid of the tolls. These guys treat the green light and the raised barrier as the start of the race:





And speaking of anti-social behaviour here's one of joy-riding in the middle of a housing estate in broad daylight. I don't know what estate it is. I'm just glad I don't live in it. Imagine trying to raise children in an environment like this. Would you be able to do it and keep them away from this type of behavior? It wouldn't be easy:





Finally, just to give some balance to this in case it appears that I'm just out to knock Finglas I want to assure you that I'm not. There are many areas where this type of thing goes on and some of those happen to be in Finglas. My sympathy to the normal people living there who have to put up with this type of stuff.

I'm sure many people looking at these clips are thinking that the solution is tougher policing and 'taking the gloves off' etc, etc. As an argument against that here are some YouTube clips from 'hoods' in Belfast. Joy-riders there have been getting knee-capped and their limbs broken for decades. The extra danger only seems to have added to the thrill:

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Finding Love Online

Internet dating web-sites are an increasingly common way of meeting new people. With so many dating sites out there picking the best one for you is as tough as finding Miss or Mr Right. I didn't realize however, until tonight, that there was also a niche market in sites that review and compare dating web-sites. Of course, with most dating web-sites charging membership fees it is a good idea to shop around and find out a bit about a site before you join it. So comparison and review web-sites are a good idea.

The one I had a look at was called Online Dating Tips. As well as listing some of the top dating sites it also gives basic advice about online dating.

The site is pretty thin on actual reviews of the dating sites listed. It would be useful if the site concentrated more on that. It has the look of a new site. At the moment the FAQ page is unfinished. The footer information is missing from the page and there are no FAQs. Hopefully in time they'll be able to develop it a bit more and build up some more detailed information on the various dating sites which would help to make it a useful resource for someone looking at joining one of them.

The main strong point of this site at the moment is the dating tips it gives which seem to be mainly pretty sound and useful advice such as what warning signs to look out for and meeting for the first time.

The section which was of the most interest to me was Long Distance Dating. At the moment and for nearly a year now there are a couple of hundred miles separating me from my girlfriend. It was interesting for me to read the advice they give. It mainly comes down to regular phone calls but good advice nonetheless.

At the moment this is the bones of an online dating review site. It's off to a good start but more information needs to be added into it.

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Ian Paisleys Giraffe Love Child

I could have made (photoshopped) an awful lot more of this, but apparently there's a ceasefire on and everybody is being super nice to everybody else at the moment. However I have often remarked at the similarites between Ian Paisley and a giraffe chewing its cud and I thought it would be remiss of me to let his announced retirement pass without making an attempt at ridiculing him.

However nice he may be now, never forget what an evil bastard he used to be. If it wasn't for him the last 40 years could have been a lot different.

Forty years is a long time. Lots of water has passed under the bridge in the meantime and hundreds of people have been shot dead. Being Mr Smiley for the last two years doesn't make up for that.

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The Mad Irish, Saint Patricks Day and an Englishmans Little Finger

I was away in Donegal for St Patricks Weekend. I spent my St Patricks Day watching a live Gaelic football match in what used to be the Gaeltacht. I don't often go to football matches of any type but I thought it was great the way we could drive onto the grounds and watch the match from our car. This has led to the use of the car horn which I thought was a brilliant advance to cheer on the teams!

Another step forward would be a scoreboard to let us know who was winning. Either that or linesmen who raise their arms when someone scores a point! We left the match not knowing who won. We had thought that our local team had lost but it turned out afterwards that they had won by six points.

While most people in this 'Gaeltacht' now speak English I was quite chuffed and also embarrassed to hear two neighbouring spectators talking to each other and sharing a joke in Irish. I have heard other people tell of the same experience: Hearing someone express emotion through Irish, whether it be happiness or anger, makes the language seem more real to those of us who learned enough of it from a textbook in a classroom to pass an exam. It is good to hear Irish being used for simple everyday communication between people. This is more likely to be heard nowadays in the Gaeltacht but increasingly less so.

I've never liked St Patricks Day in Dublin very much. Internationally the Irish have a reputation for being great party people and great drinkers. I think that too many people try to live up to this reputation, resulting in drunkenness and unruly behaviour. Contrary to our reputation as heavy drinkers, Ireland was near the bottom of the league in Europe for consumption of alcohol up until the 1990s. This was due to the large amount of total abstainers who balanced out the heavy drinkers and also the simple lack of money that was experienced by most people. Since then our consumption of alcohol and also illegal drugs has increased and we are now close to the top.

Too many people are trying to be the 'mad Irish' with enough money to buy the alcohol but not able to handle the consequences.

When I returned to Dublin on Monday night I thought it was a pretty quiet St Patricks Day night. I walked from Busaras to O'Connell St to catch my bus home and, while there were plenty of rambling drunks, there were far less than I expected. Also I didn't sense any kind of menacing atmosphere as I walked along Talbot St. No doubt this was due to what must have been an impressive Garda turnout that day. Apart from a couple approaching from the opposite direction there was nothing remarkable at all. The man, with an English accent, was asking passers-by to kick his girlfriend. She, also English, thought this was a great idea.

As I walked along Talbot St towards O'Connell St it was approaching 10pm and the Gardai walking towards me in pairs were heading back to Store St to finish their shifts. In a way you have to wonder what kind of city it is that the police are only willing to walk the streets in pairs but I suppose it's nice to have someone to talk to.

Standing at the bus stop on O'Connell St I looked around and saw only minor trouble. There were plenty of drunks wandering around. I only saw a little splatter of blood on the footpath. While I stood waiting for my bus a(n Indian) security guard from the McDonalds beside my stop ran across the street to help the (African) security guard at the Burgerking across the road who was having trouble with the (Irish) drunk who was shouting at him asking him why he didn't go back to his own bleedin' country. In the end the drunk, being outnumbered, gracefully offered to shake hands with the security guard.

The quietness of the night was confirmed by the amount of vacant taxis driving past. After getting on the bus I eavesdropped on the phone conversation of a bar worker who had been let go home early because it was quiet. In fact it was so quiet that he had first had a break and then been let go home.

It was only when reading the paper the next day that I heard about the riots in Finglas and it appeared that there was more to the St Patricks Day disruptions than usual. Finglas seems to have experienced the worst St Patricks Day violence with incidents of car-jacking, joy-riding and car-burning, as well as other non-car-related vandalism. Arrests have been made, mostly teenagers. Isn’t it grand?

I also read today in the Evening Herald about Guy Wallace, a 17-year-old Englishman, who was attacked on O’Connell St by five people after he was asked where he was from. He was allegedly then beaten and had his hand forced against the footpath which ripped the little finger off his hand. The finger hasn't been recovered and Guy a piano and rugby player is learning to cope without it.

That's the version according to the Evening Herald anyway. Other news sources, including RTE, are more restrained, saying that Guys story is one possible theory being pursued by the police. Another is that it happened accidentally as Guy ran down the street while running away from an incident in a take away. Apparently he was so drunk that he can't really remember what happened.

Following the murders of the two Polish men in Drimnagh the media are looking out for stories of race-related attacks by Irish teenagers, who are apparently much more racist than their elders - ;) - and the story of Guy Wallace appears to fit in. However contradicting this his father, a Conservative councillor on Somerset County Council, said that this type of thing can happen anywhere in the world. No Irish exceptionalism here.

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Rap Artists on the Web

RapArtists.com is a newly established web-site. The site is owned by First Beat Media. The stated aim of the web-site is to bring the most up to date hop news, gossip, music, and anything related to the hip hop scene.

The site is only new. At the moment the front page consists mainly of top-ten-style lists. A more useful section is the 'Artists Listing' which gives biography details, as well as the discography of the hip hop artists in the list. Hopefully the list will be added to in the coming weeks. As a thirty-something I would like to see a section on the history of hip hop and the past masters of rap. At this stage in its evolution rap has a significant history behind it already and there is plenty of room for this site to expand.

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Planting my Christmas Tree on Saint Patricks Day

The back story to my bonsai Christmas tree is short and simple. I bought this little pre-decorated tree in December to combine my interest in bonsai with my wish for a real Christmas tree that would fit in my small enough flat.

Many people think that the point of bonsai is to be able to keep trees indoors. However the reality is that most species of trees don't do well indoors. While there are species that do well indoors, they are the ones from warmer climates which are able to cope with the temperatures in modern heated homes. Trees which grow outdoors in the Irish climate can't survive indoors for very long so therefore my idea when I got this miniature Christmas tree was to 'return it to the wild' so to speak after the festive period was over.

In my case this involved a little bit of a trek. I don't have any outdoor space in my flat in Dublin. Not even a window sill. So when Christmas was over I brought the tree up to Donegal to my girlfriends home.

While the weather in Ireland in general isn't very good Donegal, and in particular the coastal area, gets its fair share of storms and we left the tree in a cool room to let it adjust a little rather than remove it from one extreme to another. The intention was to begin a transition process which would see the tree being slowly moved outside.

One thing led to another and the weeks became months etc, etc. Anyway three months later the tree was on the same window sill in the same room and I was looking at it and saw it was starting to go brown on one side. This obviously wasn't a good sign and since the weather was nice I decided it was time to plant the tree outside.

Since my intention is to keep the tree as a bonsai I have planted it in its pot in the ground. It should get all the nutrients it needs from the soil but it will still be in its pot.

I planted it on an unusually St Patrick's Day and the view from the garden was marvelous. Hopefully the little tree will settle into its surroundings. I'll check on its progress over the next few months.

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Smokers Remain in Debt Longer and Die Younger

As a reformed smoker I'm completely against the habit now. I surprise myself how anti-smoking I've become. Even walking beside someone smoking on the footpath is too much for me now.

With my new found anti-smoking enthusiasm I always enjoy hearing news reports that confirm my prejudices. That was why I was interested to read an article by Fairinvestment.co.uk today about the financial implications of smoking.

Fairinvestment.co.uk took the example of someone smoking 20 cigarettes per day. Based on this they found that that person could spend more than £2,000 per year. Now there is nothing new about reports like this. The punitive taxes on cigarettes are there to encourage people to give up smoking for financial if not for health reasons.

However Fairinvestment.co.uk went a step further. Rather than just saying that a smoker is spending £2,000 per year on a habit that is killing them they also related this to the persons financial health. The money that a smoker spends on cigarettes could alternatively be used to pay off outstanding debts for credit cards or Mortgages quicker and therefore cheaper.

Therefore the £2,000 that a smoker spends every year on cigarettes is costing them much more in extra interest that they could avoid paying if they paid off their debts sooner.

In addition to the higher life assurance costs associated with smoking it is worth thinking about that the habit is also taking you longer to pay off your mortgage. Since you are also likely to die younger too that means that the period of time in which you can fully enjoy the ownership of your own home is being shortened in every direction.

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Where Was I On 9-11?

The first job I ever had was counting cars. I got this job while I was taking part in an information technology course.

I started the Fastrack to Information Technology (FIT) course with high hopes. The course was in its second year of existence. Some of the graduates of the first year had done pretty well out of it. Big name companies had stepped forward during the course of the year to offer apprenticeships to the top graduates from the course. A couple of them had gotten internships with Microsoft and more had gotten jobs with AOL and other hi-tech companies with good prospects. At the time I applied for the course there was every reason to hope that the next years graduates would do as well.

I didn't realise it at the time but there was an ominous bit of news over the radio as I sat in the reception area waiting to be called for my interview for the course. The receptionist relayed the news to a colleague in another room: "They're saying a second plane just crashed."

The dot com bubble was probably going to burst anyway but in the immediate months after 9-11 the sense of doom and gloom and impending armageddon was used as an excuse for many things. Many things. This was how I started my FIT Software Testing course in Ringsend VEC.

The course was further complicated by a type of culture that developed in the class among a group of locals who were all in their late teens/early twenties and taking part in the course to get an extra allowance on top of their regular social welfare payment.

Things quickly descended into a farce and it was like I was back in secondary school with a class-full of messers and jokers. Not what you'd expect from 'mature' students. One of our tutors resigned because she couldn't take it any more.

Added to this was the fact that all of the sponsorship from the previous year had fallen away. In the new post 9-11 world the dot coms weren't expecting such growth as before and were not willing to make promises of internships to any of the graduates.

I quickly decided to get out of the course and started applying for jobs. I hoped to trade on the fact that I was participating in an Information Technology Software Testing course, and wherever possible exaggerate the difficulty of it, in order to get myself into some type of computer/office based job. One of the jobs I applied for was described as 'data entry'.

This was how I started to work in traffic surveying. I don't know what they were thinking when they described the job as 'data entry'. A closer description would be 'data collection'. An even closer one would be 'counting cars'. People who have experienced the job at first hand get to the nub of the issue and describe the job as 'clicking cars'.

Many people have had unusual jobs in the past and I am happy to be able to say that my first job was counting cars. It's a good conversation starter for someone who is not a good conversationalist. Less good is when I say that I am now back counting cars again!

While many people are happy to talk about the stupid or unusual jobs they've had in the past they are happy to do so because they are in the past. Not for me.

Then again, there is always the story about how I quit my well-paid job six months ago to try to make a living from blogging and how I ended up back doing the same job I started out with when I first entered the jobs market. There's a lesson to be learned in this story for many people. Being able to tell people that I count cars for a living is a welcome distraction from having to tell that story!

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The Best Ride in New York

With the Euro to Dollar exchange rate being so good at the moment there are more reasons than ever for Irish people to take a short trip to New York. Indeed the numbers who make the journey every year is already astounding considering the size of the population.

Having never been to New York the mental image of a yellow cab is the one that sticks in my mind when I think about taxi/hackney type services.

While reading the Blank Top Chronicles blog recently I saw somebody mention a car service which seemed to be something different to a taxi service.

Looking it up on the web it appears that the closest comparision to it here is a hackney service. However a car service can be more than that too. One I found was Dial 7, which is cutely called 'the best ride in town' by New York Magazine. They guarantee to provide a reliable Newark, JFK, Westchester and LaGuardia airport car service.

The cars seem fancier than the type generally used as hackneys here in Ireland and Dial 7 describes itself as a car and limousine service. They accept online reservations too so it is possible to make a booking to have a driver waiting for you when you arrive in New York.

What I think is a really nice feature about Dial 7’s airport pick-up service is that you are given a free phone number which you can ring to be directed to your driver upon arrival.

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My First Animation

The .swf object above is my first animation created in Poser7; a silhouette of a running man. To be honest there isn't really much effort involved in creating a simple animation like this - once you know how to do it! In my case it took me an hour to work out how.

I created it with the aid of this video tutorial. It took a little bit of improvising on my part because the tutorial was based on a different version of Poser so it wasn't exactly the same.

I'm new to animation but, while the hour I spent working out how to create Running Man was frustrating at times, I had the gratifying feeling at the end that I had learned something.

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I Want to be a Flying Doctor

I'm looking for jobs at the moment. It's beginning to look more and more like I'm going to be going back into a call centre for more punishment. I had hoped for something more interesting and rewarding but those types of jobs haven't been lining up outside my door for me over the last couple of months.

One of the more interesting jobs that I’ve come across recently is that of air ambulance staff. Aerocare is a worldwide air ambulance service based in the United States but operating worldwide.

The equipment at their disposal is astounding. For example the Lear 35A. This is used for long range missions into Europe, Central & South America and Canada, among other places. It can be used to carry out rapid evacuations and can provide state-of-the-art clinical care in an ICU environment with the most advanced technology available at altitudes up to 45,000 feet.

It must surely be a rewarding experience to be involved in something like this.

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