Notes and Jottings

Serena? Terry? Lin? What’s going on?

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Hixie’s data: URI kitchen comes in great for getting involved in the First Annual Blogger Snowball fight! And as an extra bonus, people need a Gecko browser to partake fully once data: URIs become enmeshed in the culture
I think I’d better do my own data kitchen though - I don’t think GIF and PNG images for snowball fights were what Hixie expected traffic-wise

Azumanga Daioh is one of those currently lesser known anime/manga series outside of Japan, but it is currently “fairly” popular in Japan, and will become quite so here too! From what I’ve seen of it (15 fansubs), the quality is excellent throughout, and will appeal to many people.

The series is about a set of students in middle school, plus their teachers and assorted animals. The series goes through their life over a number of years, focusing on small events such as the yearly sports day, or a school test, or copying homework, and adding in the personalities of the characters to the mix. And what results is a very pleasant and enjoyable series.

The characters are all interesting, some are lovable.
Sakaki-san needs a little kitten of her own to satisfy her properly. ick. I’ve just re-read that - read it with the most naive interpretation, please.

Tomo is so often annoying, and yet you wish you could just sit her down for a little chat and maybe you could knock some sense into her, and then she’d be really nice. But when she hears something like the above, she takes it as a personal challenge - no guesses as to what happens next!

And all the characters have their own idiosynchrosies - Osaka (once called Ayumi) has some of the more obvious “issues”, she needs to pull herself together Enjoyable to watch her make a mess of things every time though!
The screenshot above shows Osaka having some issues when trying to get on to an escalator when going shopping with Chiyo-chan (the girl at at the top left of the shot)…
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Just think of the headline ‘Saddam wriggles free again’ - it induces apoplexy in the White House

Here is an argument by Rupert Cornwell which suggests that the main reason for the flying of the American flag against Iraq at the moment is that thing known as ‘face’.

I agree with many (if not most) of Rupert’s points here. It appears that I have a similar view to many Europeans on the effect of America’s actions in the Middle East, and a similar wondering as to why the US cannot see this. Anti-Americanism is something which current actions seem to incite, and such thoughts on both sides heap barrel-loads of negative energy to the situation.

Well this is a bit late, but Happy Christmas! Late partly because I was at home in Clonsilla, and it’s more awkward to spend enough time online to do things like update online journals - time better spent catching up on email and other things.

Christmas was fun anyway - Christmas Day was very very much a day for watching films. We saw the whole of Fellowship of the Ring, as well as the whole of Monster’s Inc., as well as two episodes of The Office (for my dad’s benefit). And Give Up Yer Auld Sins. I think the DVD player was a successful present

Gary’s Photo Gallery

I was not too happy with the way that creating the gallery with Photoshop worked. Didn’t seem scalable. And tonight I had some spare time on my hands so I’ve installed Gallery as a program to display all my images. It works really really well. But you can see for yourself

Lessee… Christmas party at work. It felt like a Christmas party, it acted like a Christmas party. It just wasn’t supposed to be a Christmas party, as it was supposed to be postponed until January It sufficed, though! That was last Friday, was pretty fun.

Saturday - Funderland from 2:30 to 6pm. For those who don’t know what Funderland is, it’s a fun fair event that arrives in Dublin for a week or two just after Christmas EVERY winter. And this year I got to go to the press day, which happens just before Christmas, and is free. The other side of the coin is, of course, that there are large queues for almost everything. Ah well. Was fun. And I always go to Funderland anyway, so it was really good fun - the Waltzer was good.

Saturday evening, met Mal and Davida, went for food for a while, lots of chat. Nice to talk to them for a while - of course I haven’t seen Mal as much as I used to, ever since we stopped working together. Good company though
Sunday morning - The Two Towers, with Mal, Davida and Aidan. Full review coming (maybe). I really enjoyed it, would be a reasonable synopsis! Gollum was done really really well!

Sunday evening - party at Linda and Robert’s. Always fun. And this time we had Pauline, Sheila and Stephen back from various foreign places - the gang back together, so to speak!

And that was my weekend.

Gary’s Birthday 2002

Right. Well for a start, I didn’t take any of these photos. I know a lot of them are strange or black and white or whatever - hey it gives an idea of the night anyway! I wasn’t in any state to take many photos… judge for yourself
It was a fun night though - even if I did lose a few things (all recovered though) - a long story, though you can expect it to be a pretty drunken story.

I was heading home from the unofficial Christmas party of our group in work, and after saying farewell to others at Mount Street, I headed up past the Art Gallery towards home and bed.

At the corner of Merrion Square just across from the Natural History Museum, a quick hiss of the brush in the Square came to my notice. And what was there but a little dog. Look a little closer? No, it was a little red fox! I don’t know if it was big enough to be an adult, but hey this was my first time seeing a fox, so I don’t have an idea of sizes…

Anyway, the fox was looking at me. I moved a bit, and it padded down the street a bit, but continued to watch me. I shifted slightly to have a clearer look - it looked amazing. We stayed in this position for a minute or so, then the fox moved into the underbrush - I could still see it watching me from there for another minute, and finally - it was gone.