A proliferation of poxy P’s

Jaysus.

So far, and with great effort of will, I have avoided writing one of those  painful posts  apologising for not posting more often.  Ohh the alliteration.

And I’m not about to start now.

But if my idyllic vision of the future is anything to go by, and its not, then I’ll soon be the most prolific poster of pointless pontification this side of the pacific, which is nowhere near here.

As of March 1st, I’ll be a full time housewife. House-husband somehow manages to sound pretty gay, so housewife it is. Don’t say it to my face though cos I’m a ninja killer type and may just decide to assassinate your ass on the spot in a fit of humourlessness.

And that deadline (March 1st) piles the pressure on, pertaining to  the completion of the Harolds Cross Gym. A P too far? maybe, but that’s how I walk the walk brother; on the livid keening edge of edginess.

But to the point: In my imagination, this housewife lark is a breeze and thanks to the miracle of t.v. and my learned ability to ignore everything that’s happening around me at any given time, I’ll be swanning about for HUGE chunks of the day entertaining myself with blogs and surprise nappy changes.

And as for aforementioned said referred-to previous, the gym that is, well it’s going, but it’s going slow.
Had the brother out on the weekend doing some woodworky magic with his marvellous array of sharp objects and obsessive attention to detail ( seriously, who measures to a third of a millimetre?), and his missus painting for all she was worth.

Then today I got my poor auld dear auld retired Da out of his slippers and cobwebs and got him painting more walls. Good for the joints apparently, or so I told him.

Also put up the completely incomplete site, just to get something sort of started. Trouble is though, money’s getting tight and there’s a shitload more to do and pay for.

I dont worry about nuthin, no, cos worry’s a waste of my time.

And also because, due to  my famous memory frailties, I forget what it is I’m worried about after about a minute or so.

what?

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Redmond’s Axiom of Platform Dependency

Axiom: Karate is not a person, place, or thing. Karate is only a set of instructions. Until those instructions are executed by someone, they exist only in the abstract. Karate has no philosophy. Karate has no shape. Karate has no effectiveness. Karate has no qualities at all other than as a set of instructions. The person doing karate gives it all of its qualities way a glass gives water shape, the way computer hardware gives software speed and reliability.

I found this here.  Dealdly site, honest and thought-through opinions on martial arts (actually, it is supposed to be exclusively about Shotokan Karate, but there’s nothing there that doesn’t apply to all other traditional martial arts ) by a guy who really knows his stuff.

It’s a rare and electrifying when something you read fires a nailgun through a slippery bastard of  a thought that has been flitting through the shadows for years. I never found the words to cage the understanding, so I’d just get little epiphanies, moments of clarity and certainty on parts of the whole. Then it would all get foggy when I try to write it down.

As usual though, somebody else has done the hard work. Thanks Rob.

Brings to mind a guy that trains in my Taekwon-Do club. He stopped training a few years ago and then came back after starting something else. Now he constantly bangs on about how superior his new martial art is and how a guy doing his robo-killer destructo art could beat the holy living josephmarychrist-save-us shite out of any “Taekwon-do man”.

Did I mention he gives these little sermons in a tkd club? cheeky fucker.

But heres another interesting bit; as far as I know he has never competed in either art. So not only is he a novice in both arts, but for all his “this imaginary guy would beat that imaginary guy” horseshit, he has no experience of conflict, even the tame controlled conflict of contact sport.

Uniquely unqualified. Yet noisy. The scientist in me suspects an inverse-square law of some sort probably applies here. Or the empty vessel chestnut.

In other news, I really have to write this shit down more often, very cathartic (if thats the word?).

Also blogs with no posts are  even less entertaining than blogs that hammer on about boring irrelevant crap.

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lemsip lightweight.

The epic cold snap of 2010 has laid me bare, I can no longer deny that I have become a lily-livered lightweight.

I used to to be hardy,  this time  three years ago I got out of bed at 6am and drove out to a building site in swords to start work at 7. It was freezing and dark as a big bucket of frozen pitch. But I’d get changed out  in the elements and have an hours work done before the sun slouched over the horizon.

We worked the best part of a ten hour day most days and took two twenty minute breaks.
1 x mug of tea + 2 x sandwiches = 20 minutes, then you stand up and go back to work. And the work was hard physical labour, I was sweating buckets all day long, even in winter. I’d have to be hit by something like a Mercedes e-class or bigger to take a day off.

But now look at me, I get tired after I’ve been down to the shops and back, I need a little sit-down. It’s a five minute walk in each direction.

And I got a cold there during the big winter of 2010. Started with the sniffles and snowballed (heh!) into a mild headache and general feeling of not-too-greatness. And that’s all it took to keep me inside, whinging to the missus for lemsip and whiskey, sleeping half the day away to aid my recovery.

Meanwhile there’s a half-destroyed warehouse in Harolds Cross that I’m supposed to be renovating that is costing a geansaí-load of money every month in rent, and I’m not there working because my nose is a bit runny.

In a hilarious irony, I actually do fight at lightweight, because I’m only small.

Thats right, its “a hilarious” because as an Irishman I can follow an ‘a’  with a ‘h’ without breaking a sweat, and it doesn’t sound like I rammed two vowels together like the front and rear wheels of a crashed yaris, because there is a not-silent ‘h’ in the middle.

stick that in your pipe, bucko.

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New (nerdy) hobby

So I did that thing with the Joomla and the database and all that, and now my new hobby is playing with wordpress widgets.

And by playing with I mean butchering, mangling and abusing the perfectly well thought out and implemented code and systems that my betters have left lying around to be ‘developed’.

Next up is the blogroll. Currently I’m using SBS Blogroll,  a nice wee widget that runs off and gets post titles and dates from the blogs I follow (via rss feeds), and sticks them up there to the left so I can see if anyone has posted something new recently.

Except it seems to fail on a couple of  feeds and on closer inspection I think I can do a better job.
Not better in a proper coding sense, Jaysus no, I mean I can hack together something that does the same job, dosn’t fail on any valid feeds but can’t cope at all with the unexpected, and may cause something to catch fire.

Wordpress has a class called SimplePie that deals with RSS feeds and, theoretically, takes the pain out of dealing with them. In actuality it’s a massive cover-all-possible-situations yolk and dosn’t look at all painless to me.

Since there’s a perfectly good http request class (WP_http) and RSS feeds are pretty simple things (or Really Simple if you want to get all pedantic about it), then I should just request the feed, then take everything between the <channel> tags and chop out the couple of bits I want; title, post title and publish date.

Or is that too simple? Could doing this cause the internet to seize completely? Am I responsible enough to make this kind of decision?

I’ll brew some tea, the solution is always in tea. Or gin, sometimes.

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Ginspiration

In between stuffing my fat face with gin and after-eights ( a lovely combo, a stunning hangover), it occurred to me that I’m approaching the whole integration thingy (see previous post) a bit backwards, and slow.

Ironically, backwards and slow is exactly how I was described in  ‘Irelands most eligible Bachelors of 1997′, free with the Farmers Journal.

Anyhow,  I’m gonna spend the quiet part of tonights shift in the poxy nightclub coding up a new widget that goes directly to Joomlas database to get the menus for the wordpress sidebar.

Technically this will make me a web development professional, cos I’ll be getting paid while working on web development. That the people paying me are under the impression that they are paying me for something else is, vis-a-vie, compost mentis, besides the point, going forward, carpe vespera.

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Wordpress/Joomla pseudo-integration(ish)

See this here, what you’re looking at, see it? course you do, but you’re probably wallowing in disgusting ignorance as to the significance of the medium.

The medium is the message. Somebody by the name of Marshall McLuhan said that, and years of trying to figure it out have led me to the conclusion that I shouldn’t listen to pronouncements made by people with suspicious names.

This is my new wordpress installation, unnecessarily integrated (slightly) into my already unnecessary joomla site.
It’s not a proper back-end integration, I think that has been tried before by people that actually know what they are doing with less than perfect results, and a bluffer like myself would do himself a great favour by staying away from projects that are beyond the awesome power of bluff.

No, this is my front-end-pseudo-integrated wordpress/joomla doohickey.

First I installed wordpress on its own sub-domain, just because I could and it looks neater than just leaving it in a folder off the main site, and I pointed the blog link in my main (joomla) menu at it.
Then, and this is the clever bit, I made a wordpress widget that goes and fetches any joomla menu from the joomla site and sticks it into my wordpress sidebar.

I jiggied up a wordpress theme to mimic my joomla template and kablammo! front-end-pseudo-integration!
A good fake is as good as the real thing in my humble, and this suits my purposes admirably.

With one slight glitch, one which you are probably aware of already. The joomla menu is nicked from a joomla page, naturally, so we have to wait for slow-as-fuckery joomla to serve up that entire page with all its poxy slow sql queries before my lovely widget can strip out the menu I want. Which is why the sidebars took so long to load. Gor bless wordpress for her ability to serve up the main content without waiting for the the side bits, Gor bless er.

If there’s even a glimmer interest out there I’ll make the widget available to download. Hell, I’ll probably do that anyway but I’m going to use it as a comment carrot first. Cos I’m lonely.

In other news, I read this post on Eoin Butlers blog, and added it to the growing pile of anecdotal and empirical evidence that my original suspicions regarding babies were correct: that mostly babies are about projectile shitting.
My own continuing experiment in this field managed to miss me by a hairs breath with ballistic poo, though she got my favourite chair which was about three feet away, or three times her own body length, and also has managed to pee in her own ear. The puking, while impressive in itself, is not spectacular enough to carry any great weight in a country that raises the international standard for spontaneous and imaginative  stomach evacuation in the adult  population every weekend without fail. Go us!

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I love Steak

The bro got married last weekend, and himself and this missus are foodie types so the whole kit and kaboodle camped out in celebychef Kevin Dundons gaff down wexford way.

I’m a big lover of weddings, funerals and any other excuse for getting all pissed up on booze while in a suit, and this was no exception to that rule.
But it’s the food bit that has me posting. Kevo, because we’re mates now, oh the craic me and Dundo, as I do sometimes call him, have when we are on the tear, sure its mighty. Anyway we’re like this (does something disturbing with index and middle fingers) since I was round his gaff and all, and Kevo is reputedly a michelin star chef, although I can’t find any direct mention of this on the net, but he’s definitely in there or up there someplace in the highest echelons of cheffery.
I had steak, I’m cutting directly to the mains here cos that’s kind of tough frontiersman John Wayne type that I am. So, the filet steak, marvellous  job there Dundo, it was exactly as a steak should be; about the size and shape of a fist, lovely pink all the way through, a carnivorous dream.

I had Venison the next night cos I’m also a woodsman hunter type and its good to keep some survivalist flavour, keeps me on my toes in case of apocalypse. Also I like to pretend I’m Robin Hood, Errol flynn era, with lots of bread and no cutlery. That approach does not always go down well at weddings as some folk lack imagination, especially older folk who almost never  get into the mutton-leg waving food-spitting vibe with the hearty laughter and the wench raping and all.
And the venison was great too.

But see, here’s the rub; two courses in Dundos gaff is €56. In my experience thats on the high side, unless one of those courses is cocaine or dinosaur eggs.
And although all the food was bang on, I know I’ve had pretty much just as good elsewhere, and at half the price. Its all a bit of a bluff really, food only gets so good, its diminishing returns after a point.

My mate Clumsey Bear once worked as a steak Chef in a Sidney shithole called Filthy MacFaddens or something, and turned out lovely steaks despite his handicap. Steaks are probably his one and only talent, other than knocking things over.
I once got a steak in averagy nice place in Prague that was every bit a good as Dundos, and it cant have put me back more than a handful of clams.

When folk are into something they just want to spend money on it. I do it myself, I’m a terrible hoor for big speakers, fancy boxing gloves I don’t really need and rare records I can’t afford.
The foodies can keep their elite food, its’ for them anyway. And although my presence brings a touch of class to even the classiest joint, they don’t really need my lack of enthusiasm.
For my part, I like the grub but would prefer not to be walking out of there with a sore arse, if you take my meaning.

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ArachnoWho?

Yeah, so, Arachnotron.

I wanted to take the time to explain myself fully, as early polling has shown that I may have chosen a hard to defend position on this one. Sometimes a man has got to stand up and do what’s right, believe in his own judgment and walk the walk.

Unfortunately I’m a bit tired and, due to my unusual value system whereby the urge to sleep trumps even the survival instinct, I’ll represent myself poorly, offer a half baked argument  and slink off to beddy byes. Leaving future-me to look like a twit, but then what do I care about that fucker? He can’t do anything for me or to me, time moves in only one direction and that dudes problems are his own.

Anyway, we came to a shortlist of names for our firstborn child, a daughter as it turned out. The list was made up of several names for each possible sex, compiled by the missus, and one all covering unisex mighty name postulated by my bauld self, that name being Arachnotron.

Now I’ve heard the arguments against, I’ve done my research. There’s no point in telling me the name sounds daft, that I’m naming a person and not an advanced piece of futuristic  military hardware or that the child will get a fierce slagging.

For a start pretty much nothing rhymes with Arachnotron, leaving the primary school kids with little ammo. Maybe if myself and herself get divorced they could chant “Arachnotron, yer Da is gone”  but that’s both contingent on an unlikely event and also a bit weak, even for six year olds.

Secondly, advanced pieces of futuristic military hardware often have cool names;  apache, cobra, sidewinder, xk-11 etc.  At the same time parents are constantly trying to give their kids cool names so they will be better equipped to survive the hostile social environs of the education system;  Lee, Zoe, D’jemelanie or whatever.
I’m just ahead of the curve on this one, quantum leaping to the name everybody is going to wish they thought of first.

And, most relevantly, when this child grows up to be a twenty-five foot tall, spider shaped robot with pulsating green lasers flashing from her eyes, reducing the city to smoking blasted rubble, Roisín is going to sound pretty lame.

I lost that one. I fought the good fight but she’s tougher than she looks, is the missus. The childs name is Roisín.
I have to admit, it does suit her; she’s all small and cute and red-faced. She does all that super-cute baby gurgling and and a very funny sneeze, like a kitten sneezing.

I can only hope that she continues to grow into her name, and not into a metal and silicon construct driven by an alien and nameless rage.

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whoda thunkit

Holy fuckin fuck.

I’m someones Da. And if you don’t think that’s some crazy shit then you my friend are one fucked up sonovabitch.

Also I’m not one bit sober. Not even a really small bit. Nano-sobriety, never met ya.

I’ll leave the whole Arachnotron argument for another post, one where I’m not rolling through a sleep deprived hallucinatory soft focus world of my own invention.

Word.

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Boiling Bunny in the Oven

I wrote a post a little while back along the lines of ‘Holy Crap – I’m a busy wee bunny with all sorts going on and sure the likes of me, made entirely of snot and apathy, are not made to cope with all this stuffness’. Well this is that post mark II, and in the nature of sequels it’s all bigger and better and morer extremer and  also has explosions – mind yourself there.

Today I ambled into a builders suppliers with the practiced nonchalance of Roger Moore playing himself playing Bond, slapped down the credit card and racked up a mind boggling €1034 bill for timber, plasterboard and sewer pipe.

I didn’t even blink, neither did the suppliers which is fair enough because that’s pretty small fry for the likes of them.
But do I look like the kind of dude that can drop a grand and laugh it off as chump change? Do I fuck. Handsome and clever is how I look, but in a pauperish manner;  Johnny Depp playing Dan Ackroyd’s part in trading places when it all goes south and finds himself homeless drunk and homicidal, if you can imagine.
I’m very nearly unemployed and there are other pressing matters about to pressure my battered wallet.

That was a biggie, I’ll have to start working on the warehouse-to-gym conversion in a more seriouser manner, henceforth.

Also, and this is also a biggie, the missus was due yesterday. Not due to arrive or leave; due to push out my latest creation and officially put an end to my youth, which was dragging on a bit anyway. I’m thirty three now and I still dig transformers and wonder which would win in fights between various types of bears and big cats. None of that is likely to change so maybe I can balance some of that shit out with responsibility and, well, shit.

KerrrrrBlaAaammo!!!!

Told you there’d be explosions.

Also I’m now working three nights a week in a big city nightclub doing the lights for the dishko. Thank fuck for Microsoft. If it wasn’t for Vista, a cerebrally diseased  monkey could do the job, in fact a challenged monkey could still do the job if he could get all the programs that run the lights working properly when the p.c. starts up. But that ten minute technological Gordian knot workout at the start of every night keeps me valuable. I also put the stuff in the smoke machines, I do it in a manner reminiscent of Sean Connery playing Bond putting a suitcase helicopter together in Japan. Suave, but technically adept, but suave.

There’s other shit going down too, but I’ll save that so I some new shit to lay down in another post, y’all.

I like this separating text out into paragraphs separated by whitespace, I totally robbed it from another blogger who I won’t name because it’s obvious and also because I would have almost certainly have decided to do it myself eventually, probably. In fact, forget you read any of this well defined paragraph.

word, and shit.

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