They said it would never…
…well actually I said it would never happen again. About 18 months ago I managed to complete one of my life goals and crossed the finish line in the Dublin City Marathon taking with me a few thousand Euro for a local charity in Waterford City. It was a thrilling experience and one, having felt the toll on my energy resources, thought that I might never do again. It never put me off running though and since then I’ve run half-marathon runs and several 10 mile races too.
However, last December, during an indoor soccer match I badly hurt my foot and damaged some ligaments that stopped me doing anything for a long time. During my recovery I made the typical mistake of yielding to an injury rather than working it back to health and I hurt my thigh muscle, which in turn made me put additional pressure on my lower back and yes, it went too. Long story short, I’ve been plagued with injury for the last 6 months and haven’t had a single run beyond the weekly game of indoor soccer. During that time I had a lot of time to reflect on how much I missed my regular runs and the freedom I felt when in a good stride and the endorphins are flowing through the brain and I decided to set my sights on October 2009 and the Dublin City Marathon.
So, yesterday, for the first time in 6 months I felt ready to take my first steps again and went for a run. I decided that an easy 10km was what I needed and easy wasn’t the word - it took me 1 hour and 3 minutes. That’s probably the slowest 10km I’ve ever run and well off my average pace by about 15 minutes. However, I made it and it was exactly what I needed to refocus my mind. So, that leaves me with 4 months of solid training until October when it will be a warm in to the race and I don’t think that I’ve ever looked forward as much as I am to putting myself through 26.2 miles of torment again. However, as many of you out there will appreciate, running is an addiction, the feeling you get after a good run is unquantifiable or when you hit a good stride at mid-distance and you feel as though you could sprint the next 5 miles non-stop, the thought of not doing another marathon is worse than the thought of doing one. Getting there and getting back to a decent pace will be a long battle though - I’m seriously off form!
Naturally no undertaking such as a marathon should be done without trying to raise something for charity and last time around it was a local hospice; this time I’ve chosen to run for the Irish Heart Foundation and see if I can get together a few Euro for them. All those of you with your hands on your wallets, steady now, I’ll publish details of the mycharity page nearer to the event. 
Wish me luck as they say!
Dear Seller,
Trying to sell my car as I am, putting perfect pictures online with highly detailed descriptions and informative pricing and offer policy, you could only imagine my glee upon receipt of the following e-mail.
Hello seller.
Im james Run by name ,I came accross your contact details through web directory concerning the used car you have for sale and im highly interested in purchasing it.I will like to know all the details about the car before proceeding with the payment…..
1. How long have you owned it?2. Why are you selling it?
3. Last Price?
4. Any avaliable photo?
So, your swift response to these required information would be highly entertained before proceeding to the next stage. The method of payment is Cheque. Kindly email back, if it’s still forsale. Hope to hear from you asap.HAPPY EASTER SUNDAY
Regards.
James
A quick check on the headers and oh yes, it’s our sub-Saharan friends apparently or at least the IP address seems to say so. So, the poor guy took time to write to me; the least I could do was write back:
Dear James,
I am so delighted to hear from you. I showed your e-mail to my doctor and he gave me the great news that your e-mail means that I should bill you for the sum of US$ 40,000,000. Unfortunately this money can only be delivered to me by carrier pigeon, such is the international treaty on the matter. I realise that pigeons are in short supply but I believe that you have the ability to get some being a person of great resources. The bad news is that if this money does not reach me in 3 days from sub-Saharan departure I will have to assign the matter to the international authorities to reclaim this money for me. I will await the first pigeon and inform you when all monies have been received. If too much money is received then I will send the overpayment by unverifiable money transfer to your account of which I do not have the details. However, the paperwork will look impressive. Naturally I will refund too much money as I am stupid and as such I must ask that you advance me £100 to cover this stupidity.Kindest Regards,Dyelook Stew Pidtuya
I’m checking the sky everyday, waiting for that first pigeon…
Irish Sport
Just a quick thought before I watch George Lee disect the doom and gloom of blowing the boom. This weekend has seen a truly wonderful couple of days for Irish sport. The national rugby team completed an historic grand slam victory in the 6 Nations by defeating Wales in what was truly the most tense game of rugby I have ever seen and Bernard Dunne faught through an incredible battle to win the Super-Bantamweight World Champion belt in boxing. In a time of recession and societal depression, again I turn to my TV to watch George, our nation’s sports stars have not only achieved personal glory and greatness on the world stage, they have lit a beacon of hope, a focal point of happiness to lift the spirits of the Irish people. Roughly 25 people who have not changed a single thing about our economy have done more for the Irish people in one day than our entire government has done in 2 years. Says it all really… Nevertheless, well done lads, you did us all very proud.
The National Interest?
I think it was Des O’Malley (founder of the Progressive Democrats) who brought that phrase to my attention many moons ago: “in the national interest”. Many years have passed since then and the bridled chaos, held fast for so many years by nothing more than lies and the singular interests of the civil service, has now been let loose upon a chamfered society that is without direction. Ireland, litter tray of the Celtic Tiger, is now more like the pissing bed of a much more sedate and hapless creature; one that I will call the Hiberno Hamster. Yes, an animal that will happily feed away on its own faeces while running nowhere on a wheel until such time that a burst of energetic necessity causes it to keel over and self-terminate.
For too long this country has worked on the creation of the perfect little onion society. Layers within layers of workers whose sole purpose was to do the job of their superiors and justify budgetary spending of biblical proportions. Then there were layers of media and publicity that covered up why budgets were disappearing without product and they too burrowed into our state’s resource hamper and ate the yield of our tax payers. We have now started to peel the onion and unravel the putrid, stinking, flesh that is the sorry excuse for humanity, charged with the guidance of this country. We are still nowhere near the core of this rottenness but the vile odour has already seeped into our financial markets and removed all but the minute shreds of economic DNA necessary to just about keep the species alive.
Regular readers of my blog will be painfully aware that during Ireland’s so-called boom period, I bitched and moaned about inadequacies and misguided spending in Irish society. I fully attributed blame to those I saw as being wholly accountable for ill-founded invoices and I removed the veneer from the million dollar chipboard cabinet that was sold to us as progress. The time for blame was then; many media gurus feel that the time for blame is now but yet again I stand ahead of their morbid appeal and go out on a limb to suggest that blame will indeed get us nowhere in this dank quagmire of economic collapse. We need an amnesty on accountability and an rapid advent on action.
We the people now need to step up to our call. The time for complacency and inaction has long passed; no longer can we shrug off the inadequacy of our political leaders in humourous satire. The onus is on us as a nation and not us as an elected government, to do something about all that is around us; to remodel our society such that maybe, just maybe Ireland will not disappear down the rabbit hole and into a weird and wonderful land induced by poverty-stricken hallucinations. Can we do this? I do not know…
We concern ourselves with complaint about what our governing forces are not doing and yet for the vast majority of Irish democratic history we have never sought change in political leadership. Why? A nation divided by political colours and not civic duty is more akin to football hooliganism, destroying all that is good about the beautiful game. Our wretched attitude goes way beyond political adversity however. We have lost community drive, no passion in presentation of our roads, our streets, our homes within cities; no desire to go an extra mile to make something to be proud of - sure the council will clean it up. The only thing that Irish councils have cleaned up is the excess of tax monies left lying carelessly about the hallways of the Department of Finance. We have removed ourselves from caring about social issues that destroy communities by developing legislation to grant us immunity from acknowledging what is wrong with certain “minority” groups’ behaviour and a whole manner of other things. We developed tax and welfare loopholes so that the victims of society (mostly those who make victims out of society) can be kept hidden from view in council estates and be given the money to get along with things without us ever really knowing how they justify their handouts. Sometimes this skill is passed generational so that the trade is never lost, meanwhile Jack must prove his job finding trail to gain dole payment after 6 months unemployment following 20 years hard slog in the factory.
Yes, as a nation we have successfully failed to deal with everything that ever landed on our doorstep. From immunising ourselves from responsibility by introducing legislation to rejecting the voice of the people when they speak out about dissatisfying referenda, we’ve done it all. Ireland - a nation that just couldn’t give a shit! Unless of course it severely hurts the back pocket of the individual but even then they’ll just march on the streets until somebody else does something about it. The national interest? There is no national interest - the nation just isn’t interested.
Parting is never easy…
Sadly the time has come to part ways with my beloved sports car. I’ve reached that stage of life whereby I have to appear all grown up and sensible. My 2-seater, 150bhp, 2.0l straight 6, limited edition, BMW Z3 just doesn’t fit that description, no matter how much I would like it to. We’ve had our fun together and now it’s officially on the market at a complete bargain price for any enthusiasts out there who would like to get their hands on a future classic. Goodbye old girl - I’ll miss you terribly when you’re gone. 
Aero - not bubbles, it makes me boil!
Last Summer I treated myself to a new Dell laptop (Inspiron 1525). Fully loaded with a 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo and 3GB of RAM - a reasonable beast by any grade. I’m not a gamer so I didn’t beef up the graphics but it came with a decent enough setup so I was pretty sure that Eclipse, Word, Excel and my usual apps wouldn’t cause too much hassle. Up until about 2 weeks ago the machine was running fine and without any real incident. However, it then started to slow down to no end. Apps took noticeably longer to load (no, not the it’s an old PC now mindset problem 
) and typing was nearly impossible. Huge delays between hitting a key and the character appearing on the screen, sometimes problems with scrolling too. I had no idea as to what was wrong - completely stumped. I rarely doubt hardware in such situations and it turns out that I was right to do so. Following a bit of laboured internet searching and such I discovered that disabling Aero would yield significant benefits in Windows Vista. Crikey! What a difference it did make!! My laptop is like new, if not faster!
Now this was a pre-installed Vista laptop purchased from Dell with 3GB of RAM, well capable of running Vista and it did when I first booted it up. However, something happened in the last 2 weeks, possibly an update by Microsoft that made Aero swamp my system to a state whereby I could no longer type. I would like to note that disabling Aero and going for Vista Basic appearance was the only change I made - pretty conclusive in my book. CPU idling performance has dropped from 10%+ to between 1% and 3% max. Now that’s more like it. Why do these things happen? Although I guess that the real question is how are these things allowed to happen?
Been a while…
…since I had a good rant about insurance companies. Well, it’s a new year and there are two advertisements that are really getting on my nerves at the moment. The first is a radio advert by AXA who claim to be your “local” insurance company. Drop in and get your amazingly cheap policy with no fuss. Well AXA are far from your “local” insurance company so don’t let that fool you into supporting your own. In fact unless you live in Dublin or Derry you won’t be talking to somebody in the same county as you when you call them. On top of that, the great savings on offer, well I still haven’t forgotten that when I started driving and acquired my first policy through a broker who got me a policy with AXA without my immediate knowledge, they charged me over IR £3,500 to drive a standard, small-engined, of-the-shelf, family car. The next year their call centre told me that they had a blanket ban on my model of car even though I was still insured with them at the time I called for new quotes. I vowed then that I would never do business with AXA again and I never have. FBD is an example of a local company - you can actually drop into one of their offices in your county and say hello to them.
The second advert that really gets me at the moment is the Hibernian TV advert. You know the one that uses the footage of Charlie Haughy telling us to tighten our belts. I guess they didn’t think of this when they used that footage and that somehow highlighting the badness of the past would make us think that here’s a company that cuts to the chase and has no time for those who hoodwink and obstruct? Well just over 5 years ago Hibernian was the first motor insurance company to turn around and tell Irish drivers that the Irish driving test was worthless. Of course they didn’t say that exactly but in a roundabout way they did; they introduced the “ignition” driving test that placed a further obstacle in the path of young drivers with full licenses towards getting cheaper insurance and that somehow a half-day course would eliminate loads of the risk that their hefty statistics claim to otherwise represent. The biggest insult of all was that it completely undermined the official, government backed, Irish driving test by refusing to accept that drivers were qualified. The other thing that relates to that footage of CJ and the motor insurer is that for the last couple of years, while we have all been tightening our belts and getting ready for recession, companies like Hibernian were enjoying record profits in the Irish motor insurance arena. In 2007 the Irish motor insurance industry enjoyed profits of over Eur 357, 000, 000 but of course we’re the ones tightening our belts just like when CJ was buying his fancy shirts - the failure to spot the obvious similarity is frankly baffling and I for one would never hire the genius who came up with that idea for an ad.
Sigh… Rant over.
Israel - A summary
60 years ago (1948 to be exact) a large body of people of the Jewish faith decided to claim their own patch of land and subsequently invaded the lands of others to enlarge their patch. When others fought back the Israeli’s sought the support of another super power (the good old Jew S of A) and set upon a 50 year campaign of killing and land grabbing against those whom they could get away with calling names such as terrorists even if they weren’t. Sounds awful familiar to me, didn’t something similar happen in the 40’s before Israel? Can’t quite remember what… Somebody please tell little America to pull their heads in before more life is needlessly lost.
Happy New Year All!
A bit late I guess but hopefully you all had a good celebration of the annual cusp that is New Year’s. Started the year with a brisk walk/climb through the Comeragh Mountains in Co. Waterford on New Year’s Day - start as I aim to finish and all that.
This year presents many challenges for me. I’m taking a bit of time to myself to concentrate on issues that I have been trying to deal with for a while now and hopefully will come out the other side of the year better for it. One thing that I have been living with for over 4 years now is a crippling fear of flying that has prevented me taking a flight during that period. Not too much fun when the better half really enjoys the whole travel experience - I’ve become somewhat of a stumbling block; a personification that has no place, not even in the deep ramblings of trans-discipline metaphysical poetry.
I have tried plenty of things to convince myself that flying is good, etc, etc but thus far I have not been able to win over the fear. Unlike many people who suffer with a fear of flying, my problem (although I initially thought so) is not linked to either cluastrophobia nor a fear of death. Ever since I was a young kid, I have had a problem with an acute sense of motion. Rollercoasters, spinning fairground rides, and even playground swings were not the attraction that they should have been but moreso a terrifying prospect. This turned out to be something that I couldn’t avoid either in my adult life. Moving at speed as a passenger in a car (like the Mondello Race track experience that shock my nerves), going downhill in a car even at relatively low speeds if there was a sudden drop and of course the constant motion of non-contact flying were drops and rises are a constant play. To this day I’m pretty sure there are people who wonder why I always insist upon driving myself rather than taking a lift - mystery solved guys!
My good wife purchased me Allen Carr’s “Easy Way to Enjoy Flying” for Christmas in the hope that the powerful words of this master author would help me on my crusade against fear. As I read through the book, I note that it is incredibly clever and definitely a worthwhile investment for anyone with “the fear” or “FOF” as Allen refers to it as. However, my optimism is somewhat quashed too as I think that the book is mainly focussed on removing the unwarranted fear of death rather than anything that will really help me.
From all the reading that I have done, it may turn out that my choice of a rabbit as a pet may have been subconsciously influenced by having something in common with the creature. Rabbits freeze in the headlamps of cars, not because they are blinded but the fear causes their bodies to produce an excess of the chemical serotonin which puts the body into an almost paralytic state coupled with a heightened state of anxiety. The same chemical is produced by humans particularly those who do not enjoy rollercoaster rides. The opposite chemical, dopamine, is also produced by humans and probably exists in vast quantities in the boy racer community - I never thought that I would envy them, alas I tip my hat, you princes of brain[control]. Self-diagnosis is always the worst kind but try going to a doctor with the complaint that you have a crippling fear of … 10 minutes later you’ll be out the door with a prescription for Valium or Xanax. That to me is not an answer, I don’t even take paracetamol without protest never mind dope myself up just for a flight.
I wish there was a solution that would not only open the locked doors of airports in my mind but that would also set me free to enjoy many of the other things in life that I admire on paper but cannot do in practice. Answers on a postcard please…
Save the environment, ink, and money!
Yes, the recession busting font is here. A new eco-friendly font that uses 20% less ink when printing documents is now freely available to all. Just what we need in times of recession and also in terms of our environmental conscience. It’s a simple yet brilliant idea. I’ll definitely be using it for future printing where possible and perhaps it should be a consideration of others who create large documents for printing too? Enjoy eco-font!