andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

I visited my mother this weekend; and I have the Google Maps link to prove it! Well, the satellite images are clearly completely out of date because although they have recently added a lot of maps to their… maps, the images are thankfully lacking in all the new developments.

Incredibly long link here. Just click.

Ok, you can take a look, as long as there’s no stalking or attempts to sell vacuum cleaners or what have you. If you do that, I’ll kill you. Anyway, it was a brief but good visit, and the house is really coming on. It looks great. I’d have photos to post but I’m back to using the slr camera again so my photos are back on film. It’ll take a few days before I have them to scan in and post…

I had an odd and perhaps controversial idea pop into my head not so long ago. It was when I was visiting the Jennifer, in fact, and we were walking around Kilkenny town trying to spend my money on making me look fashionable (as opposed to looking very much like someone who had only just discovered the idea of clothes the week before), although that had (and has) no relation to the idea itself. The really controversial part of it all is actually airing the idea publicly, where people can see the idea, and have an opinion about it, which will no doubt be along the lines of a) Kevin is up to something, he’s got something going on and he’s not telling us or b) Kevin is completely mad, or maybe even c) Kevin is up to something, which is hardly surprising given that he is completely mad.

I think I might get married this year. Or have kids. Not both, of course, that would be ridiculous.

I have no idea to whom or where, the point is in fact that it’ll be completely unexpected and bizarre, it’ll all happen very suddenly and come as a shock to everyone, myself included. It could be, for example, to a Yak herder in Tadjikistan. Now, I know this might seem very off the wall to most people, and raise eyebrows with one or two people in particular, but there it is. It’s not a plan, it’s a statement of possibility.

2007 sees me buying a house. That’s not bizarre or adventurous (in fact it’s tedious and predictable, not unlike a Garfield cartoon), that’s just the way it’s going right now. Better sort out my job situation in that case, hadn’t I?

You know the way ‘They’ say, on food packaging, ‘serve while piping hot’? It’s too hot to eat then! They’re morons! It’s not relevent to anything, I know this, but I had to get it off my chest. It was bothering me.

It’s time for linkage! That’s right, after not posting for weeks on end, I return from the darkness only to irritate everyone with links to stuff they’ve already seen elsewhere three weeks ago, and it was a lot funnier then too! Oddly enough, people actually started asking me what was up, which suggests I may have more than two and a half readers out there. I’ve been beavering away (You like that, huh? Beavering away? Beaver? Makes you think of something else, right? You dirty scumbag!) and up to all sorts of things, which I surely promise I will explain with tedious attention to detail in a follow-on post for my long suffering, moderately loyal readers (Really, if it’s bothering you then check out Dave’s blog. His RSS feed seems to be broken but he makes jokes and seems to do some cool stuff. Just ask Tony.) Yes, I’ve been pretty busy, and some big, interesting things are afoot in my life, but we shall speak of them no more at this time. There are dark forces at work, and we must be wary of them…

Incidentally, this is my second time writing this post. It’s bigger and improved. I lost that last one due to some silly modifications I made to my Firefox browser which I use at work. I still recommend Firefox as the way you view the internet (instead of, for example, Internet Explorer), and some of the extensions are great but be careful. You can really fuck things up with them too.

Many of this weeks links have been filched from Memepool, which is a great place to find weird shit.

Life and nightlife (working and going out) in Harbin, China.
Exactly what it says on the tin, all delivered in pithy prose learnt in Celbridge!
http://haharbin.wordpress.com/
Dylan used to work in Parallel IT, where I work now, but during the rough and tumble of the post-dotcom boom when it all went pear-shaped for a while he founf himself doing a bit of this, a bit of that and made the fateful decision to go and teach English in China. We’ve always kept in touch though, and traded stories (and I still can’t get over his story about him walking in to his local Chinese store on a visit back to Celbridge not so long ago). I discovered a while ago that he actually reads my blog; in fact, I might have inadvertently planted the seeds of an idea, to write about his experiences, when I asked him to write something on this site; instead he went off and set up his own site! So go check it out, it is well written, entertaining and informative.

The best blonde joke on the Internet
The funniest, bestest blonde joke on the Internet, ever!
http://weblog.burningbird.net/2006/01/12/the-joke-is/
Follow the link to get to the best blonde joke on the internet ever.

Random Garfield cartoon generator
Garfield as zen philosophy!
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/natetrue/gar.html
Remember Garfield? Of course you do, Garfield is the poster-child of inane drivel, publisher as a syndicated cartoon the world over; it’s a bit slower these days but there was a time when is was practically a cult. The thing is, Garfield was actually funny once, when the cartoon started (I still have the first three books in the series, before Jim Davis got into a tedious formula) but there’s only so much you can do with a cat before it all gets repetitive. I checked out the website; they’re a real money-making machine with this drivel.

Anyway, the point of this link is that you can, with a random generator, create your own Garfield cartoons. Since it is repetitive, meaningless drivel, it actually works quite well.

Google video selection
The craziest, insanest video collection ever!
http://homepage.mac.com/pockyrevolution/Personal25.html
As some of you are aware, Google recently started putting up videos, and within a short space of time a vast amount of… stuff… was uploaded to their servers, converted to Flash video, and you can go and browse it, such as here. Some of it is, in some people’s eyes, pure gold and the link above is a ‘best of’ compilation by some guy of stuff that really did it for him. Saves you the trouble of having to browse it all yourself.

Incidentally, this whole video venture is Google getting into the ring with Apple and their iTunes Store to see if they can do a better job of selling videos. By all accounts, so far it’s not going very well. Time will tell.

Car Stuck Girls
Scantily dressed girls with cars that are stuck in stuff!
http://www.carstuckgirls.com/
Let’s not mince words here. It is porn. Sick, evil porn! Bad! Evil! But fun.

Right, I better start writing meaningful stuff soon, or people will get irritated.

I’m feeling pretty vacant at the moment. There was quite a lot I’d hoped to get done this weekend, including writing more stuff for this site, but… Well, last week took it out of me, I guess, topped off by a fun but grueling game of footie on Friday night. It was the first of the season so, as you can imagine, everyone was carrying around a lot of spare tyre and the like, but I really did seem to come off the worst of the lot, ambling around on the pitch as if I’d eaten more or been locked in for the whole week and half of Christmas, force fed on Stollen. As usual I started powering up later on in the game and running more, just as everyone else was winding down; I’ve started to see that if I started my warm up 30 minutes before the game instead of 10 minutes into it, then I might get more out of the game itself. I have common sense and Annette to thank for that observation, and I’ll start next Friday with this clever new approach. And eating less.

After the game I called to Garret and Nora, where Ian Cuthbertson and Aoife were tucking into some incredibly old cheese, and I was kidnapped. Ian is basically the human manifestation on Earth of Satan himself, with a liberal helping of Mr Spock. If you don’t believe me, meet the guy, and you will see in his eyes the uneasy alliance between calm logic and the eternal damnation of all mankind, being transported to his ultimate end by drink driving. That might he was trying to achieve it by mixing Kahlua and sour milk, which we were having none of, in spite of his insistence that there was nothing wrong with it, but it really did look like a bad idea. I mean, had I been in Ulaanbaatar then I suppose I might accept that as being something of the local culture and try it, but… It was Garret and Nora’s sitting room, so no. Spockbertson, drink it yourself. The kidnapping amounted to Garret hiding my shoes so that I couldn’t go home. That was ok, they have a nice futon, and it meant I could play a good prank on Garret in the morning. Heh heh…

Saturday would have been a shoe-in for the most apathetic day ever, but luckily I agreed to go out and catch up with Caroline (and John and various people from his house too – John, Lena, Coll, Anna, and Anna’s infeasibly large bosom) so that went on until the early hours. The ‘two in, one out’ drinking rule is back, which is good; basically, I drink no more than one pint if I’m drinking in a bar, and no more than two if I’m in, for example, someone’s house. Really, it does work.

Today I cycled in the Phoenix park. You know, it really is very big, it’s easier than you might think to get lost or disorientated in there. Maybe they could have a new series on RTE called ‘Disorientated’, where a bunch of people from all over Ireland get stuck in the middle of the Phoenix park, and have to fight for survival…

I chatted to Tee for a bit on Friday, and we’ve had the odd internet chat too. It was great, but I really do miss her. It’s hard, but of course it could be a lot worse and ultimately we’re both happy with what we’re doing which was always the point. Check the site out, she and the girls put up lots of photos recently and they’re worth seeing.

On the subject of ‘happy with what I’m doing, generally’, I’m actually not really. Or am I? Hmm… I have a clearer shape to the 2006 Plan For The Year, which is a lot like the plan for 2004, and 2005. I’d better just do those things or I’ll find that the plan for 2009 still looks like the plan for 2004. I’d better stop being apathetic and get moving before I find that my zimmer frame has seized up…

Today was my first day back at work in 2006, and I proudly joined the aggressive cunts going to work. In fact, I was one of them, cursing the slowness and inefficiency of the fools in front of me. Had one of them keeled over, dead from exhaustion, I would have gladly stepped over his or her cooling corpse in order to get ahead in the crowd, and get to the office that precious 3 minutes earlier.

Yeah, that’s my New Year’s sermon. It’s all about the benjamins, and fucking over some bastard that gets in my way as I climb to the top. I’m putting together my 2006 Plan, and I don’t look forward to the part where I have to think ahead to the next 5 years too, because that’s something I’ll have to do in the next month or two. I’m not getting any younger, and I need to start thinking about what’s next. You can tell I’ve been talking to thirty-something year-old women, can’t you? But it’s true, I have to. I have to think hard about my work situation, and where that’s going, and also about what I’m going to go and do later in the year. Japan and Romania both beckon this year, I’m going to have paid off all my debts quite shortly and be that rare thing in Ireland today, a thirty-something male with no debts (well, none to the bank; I’m sure I owe something to someone.) and in a number of ways free to do whatever the fuck I want.

On the bright side, I went for a run in the morning. I can start my 2006 plan by cutting a few inches off my tubby waistline. And pricing some language learning stuff for Japanese, Czech and Romanian.

More on all of this later, I have to tie up some loose ends, get some shit done and then I can do my 2005 round-up and my 2006 plan. And my thoughts on the first of the political parties here to try banking on xenophobia to win the next election. The Labour party as Brown Shirts? Oh no! There is much to be done and so little time…