Gasping for air
No time to blog - entertaining my mother and aunt who arrived yesterday and will be here until next Sunday. Swapped PC card today and hopefully this will be an end to my net deprivation. Proper update as soon as that happens. Are you all missing me? Tell me how much :-)

So close and yet so far
Finally got connected from my room last night after splashing out on a PC card, and for a while it was luverly, only problem being that I couldn't seem to send/receive cookies (?!). Then everything died. Tried to connect again this morning and nothing doing. Is the network just temporarily down (please, God), or did I change some setting and forget about it? (I was tired/drunk). Or, horror of horrors, is the f-...damned card after packing it in already?

I am particularly unimpressed at having to check mail and write this entry from an internet cafe, and yes, that is how far I will go to stop the memepool groupies mailing list (200 new in the last 18ish hours) from becoming unmanageable...

Aha
Silly me - I knew it was there somewhere. The AvantGo link for my ireland.com page, that is.

Good and bad
Get a load of this. It's Ireland.com's breaking news section, but not as you know it - chopped and cropped so it'll fit on one of these or these. I'm rather proud of this, although in reality anyone with half an ounce of programming experience could do it in less time and with less code. I'll set up an AvantGo channel proper, just as soon as I ask Cliph. Gee, maybe the Irish Times will hire/sue me!

The user is specifically prohibited from modifying, publishing, transmitting, selling, participating in the transfer or sale or reproducing, creating derivative works from, distributing, performing, displaying or in any way exploiting any of the materials on this site or the software or materials relating thereto in whole or in part...

The irony of all this is that I can't check it myself because, as of yesterday, my computer is seriously banjaxed. As far as I can work out, the supposed defragger went and completely fragged either the bootloader or the (Mandrake) Linux (for Windows - yes I'm lame) system image file (c:\lnx4win\linuxsys.img) so now I can't boot past, er, "stage 1". Might be solved be reinstalling Lnx4Win and hoping it overwrites the previous junk but otherwise it's recovery disc time. Words cannot describe how much I hate Microsoft today.

Summertime!
Summer has arrived with a bang. The last two days have been scorchingly hot with nary a cloud in the sky. I moved into new student room last Friday, plonk in the centre of town, right beside the castle and the gardens. The room has a network connection (once I get a PC card), its own bathroom and more storage space than you can shake a large suitcase at. This is all stuff I was lacking whilst with those lovely Starshot people, so now we're happy.

Meanwhile, I'm not going to pass this year, but it's cool enough here that it might be worth (possible?) saving up enough cash to repeat. Must scope that idea out; I've got until July 31st to decide. I'm currently suffering from a serious case of Flanagan's and Cann's Karlsruher Vortex Syndrome, named after Lesley and James respectively, who finally escaped back to England on Sunday after coming here to play a gig some 14 years ago. This place won't be the same without them (stroking beard and gazing wistfully into the middle distance). Just for the record, I'll be here six months on the 10th of April and god has it flown...

Actually, I think I'll stay here and open a bar. Yeah.... :-)