Author: Rory

I’ve been sucked into Bebo along with, apparently, everyone else in this college. If you use the site you can add me as a friend. Don’t take this as a recommendation though. I have to say that the site really isn’t very good. It’s slow and it’s easily confused by multiple tabs. Yes, you read that correctly. I ended up with a drawing posted on my own whiteboard because I was editing my profile at the same time as drawing on a friend’s whiteboard. At first I thought I had got confused myself, but a few less time-consuming cock-ups confirmed that it’s the site’s fault. Urgh.

I’ve just spent about twentty minutes poking around the BBC, Channel 4, Sky and RTÉ websites, as well as a lot of Googling, trying to find out who, if anyone, will be providing full coverage oof the Academy Awards on Sunday. Usually it’s Jonathon Ross on BBC1, but that appears not to be the case this year. Is there no live coverage at all this year?

A selection of bullet points in place of real paragraphs:

• Last week I suddenly decided that I’d like to play a few games of Warhammer Quest, the old Games Workshop fantasy role-playing game from 1995. I played that game a lot as a kid, but I never managed to get a group together to play regularly. I expect to play a bit this weekend, though two people have yet to confirm (you know who you are).
• In honour of Pancake Tuesday, I plan to practice my pancake throws at juggling tonight. That’s a way of juggling rings where they spin on an axis parallel to the plane of the ring (like a pancake being flipped). It’s a reasonably difficult trick, and not very attractive looking unless you do it very well, but it fits the theme.
• Progress in college is slow. This may be because I allow myself to take two hour lunch breaks and then have to go to the sandwich bar an hour later because I forgot to eat anything at lunch. I’m meant to have a paper written in about three weeks. It’s hard.
• I watched a DramSoc play today at lunch time (probably why I forgot to eat anything). It was short, only 15 minutes or so, but really funny. There was a lot of forgetting of lines and reading the script on stage, but I don’t think that really counted against it. It was like watching people just playing around on stage. Unfortunately I didn’t catch the name.

These short updates are so much easier to write than real content.

…you get an email with the subject line "Increase Your Stamina!" and you wonder what RPG it’s referring to.

A few years ago (I say a few because I don’t want to admit that it was nearly ten years ago) I was at a table quiz held to raise funds for my old school. Back then, as now, I hated being wrong. But it was even worse to be told I was wrong when I knew I wasn’t. Who doesn’t hate that?

One of the questions at this quiz was "which three planets have no moons?" Oh that’s easy! I know the planets. Let me see… Mercury, Venus, um… I complained to the quizmaster afterwards, and even named at least one moon of every other planet in the solar system (this was before any extra-solar planets had been discovered). Of course the quizmaster’s decision is final, so on that evening ten years ago, Pluto was robbed of its moon.

Well now those nice folks at NASA have found two new moons to take its place. Take that, random person I barely remember! I was right, and you were wrong. And now I’m even more right than I was then. Now all I have to do is track down my third class teacher and show her some proof that the whale shark is bigger than the great white.

Zach Braff (of Scrubs and Garden State fame) recommended checking out the trailer for Thank You For Smoking. Being a loyal fanboy I did as i was told, and you should too. There hasn’t been anything particularly enticing in the cinema so far this year, so I’m keen to find out about any good films that will be coming out soon. Everyone knows about the big films of the summer (X-Men 3 will see the cover of Empire this month, and Superman Returns has had its hype machine running for ages), but the smaller films are often much more enjoyable (cf. Garden State and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang from last year). This one looks great.

It’s not often that I’d be seen reading the sports pages of any newspaper, but this is one case in which I’m happy to make an exception. The front page of yesterday’s Irish Times caried a photo of Irish Winter Olympian Dave Connolly (probably password-protected article; use the username "trocaire" and the password "Trocaire"), who finished in the top 20 in the skeleton event with a new personal best time.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t be celebrating sporting acheivements. But Dave is an aquaintance of mine, and a very cool guy. I believe the first time I met him was at a Hallowe’en party. He had spent about 30 seconds on what has to be the best fancy dress costune i’ve ever seen. He stuck a tin foil H to his forehead and came as a hologram.

Yesterday my family went to the new local restaurant Diva to celebrate my Dad’s retirement. I haven’t chronicled the story leading up to this because it’s not mine to tell, but I will just say that had I written about it it would have made a compelling human interest story. There was no small amount of stress in the house for the last few years leading up to this, so we’re all glad it’s finally over.

Dad had a wonderful moment yesterday in the butcher’s. Being a friday, the man serving him asked if Dad was off for the weekend. "Actually," Dad replied, "I’m off for the rest of my life."

My biggest complaint about Apple’s OS X has always been the lack of full screen mode in its default media player, QuickTime Player. That function—possibly the most basic function of a video player after play, pause, stop, etc.—is reserved for the Pro version of the player. Who is that for anyway? A professional video-watcher? Anyway, QuickTime Player Pro costs €30. I have to assume it comes in a solid gold crate or something.

I didn’t pay €30 for any of the other four video players on that machine, and I’m not about to pay it for QuickTime (which happens to be the worst of them all). I’ve worked around the restriction in the past by using the screen zoom feature, which lets you zoom in on any part of the screen. Unfortunately that method leaves an ugly pointer sitting in the middle of the video. The zoomed region is determined by the position of the mouse pointer so you can’t just move it out of the way.

Thankfully I’ve now got a proper solution to the problem. No hacks, no workarounds, and best of all no €30 charge. It’s a simple AppleScript. And I mean simple: it’s a single line! That post has instructions on how to install the script and how to use it. It’s very straightforward. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be possible to assign it a keyboard shortcut, though I haven’t explored that too much so I could be wrong.

Incidentally, in case all this talk of AppleScript wasn’t enough of a clue, this only works for the OS X version of QuickTime Player.

I’ve created a special Valentine’s Day playlist in iTunes. It’s not very complete yet, so I was wondering if anyone could suggest more songs along the lines of what I’ve already got. Here’s the list so far:

• Offspring – She’s Got Issues
• Reel Big Fish – Dateless Losers
• Freddy Mercury – Living on My Own
• The Vandals – My Girlfriend’s Dead
• Radiohead – Creep
• Wheatus – Teenage Dirtbag (sans the last verse or course)

Anything missing?