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

Yeah, a Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you. Hope you were well treated by your loved ones, or well treated by yourself if not. I’ve always found it better not to place too much in these days, where you are supposed to do more of this or less of that, and all so someone can sell more cards or fish or firelighters or what have you.

I’ll have to get around to writing an in-depth answer to David’s last comment (an interesting subject indeed), and a long-winded description of my back trouble which I’ve been enjoying telling everyone about; I spent all of yesterday lying flat in more than a little pain after my back suddenly… stopped working. Very painful, and somewhat inexplicable.

And before anyone asks, Norton Disk Doctor didn’t fix it. I did try.

This week really took off, and it taken a lot out of me, as mundane as it has all been. It’s also shown me the importance of having supportive people around. Well, perhaps supportive women. Guys are silently supportive, particularly with other guys; after all, who can deny the universal language of mockery, farting and grunting? For example, I had a trying day on Tuesday, with all sorts of stuff not going right at work (which I take seriously, so when things aren’t hitting the right notes for me, I get stressed over it. And can I ever do stress, as we know well) and these things being somewhat outside of my control. But to top it off, a man phoned up, an annoyed man. Not just any man, mind, but a man who had contacted me previously about doing some web design and development work for him, and I had promised to discuss a quote with him, after having consulted with my trusty web designer.

Three weeks ago.

So, obviously, he was annoyed that I hadn’t gotten back to him, and that was bad, not least because although I’m contracting (I’m a third of the size I used to be), I’m also technically freelancing, and extremely fearful of not knowing where my next pay check is going to come from, or if I’ll be eating food or sleeping rough next week. It was also bad because of my inherent insecurity and need to please people, even complete strangers, and because of a recent episode involving what I still refer to for some reason as ‘my’ car mechanic.

My car, a ’98 Mazda 121 1.3 litre 5 door go-busters machine which I bought from my mother during the summer. It is slightly ill, and needs a good car doctor. The whole story of me driving, well… You’ll have to sit through it soon. Lollers. 8th February 2007.. Click image to view larger version »

After an initial consultation with Ultan Potts, ace mechanic, about several things that needed fixing on my car, and several weeks of fruitless phonecalls, I realised that this man had no intention of fixing anything on my car at any price. He was just going to ignore me until I went away. I was pretty annoyed because I could have had these things fixed many weeks ago by someone who could both fix cars and operate a mobile phone, and that the state of the economy was such that tradespeople could do this to you in this day and age, and wouldn’t it be better if it was like in the eighties where no-one had any money and people climbed over each other to do things for you, and how dare he. Yes, it was all very frustrating, and a little new to me since I rarely need car mechanics or builders or plumbers, I can usually fix any small thing I break with sellotape (to be fair, I fixed the broken wing mirrors on my car with Duck tape, so you can see that I’m moving up in the world) or blue-tack. Now, I’ve since managed to find a big and relatively expensive garage to fix the issue with a no-nonsense approach and at four times the price, so I’m only bothered now about the principle of the thing.

Which of course, is why I was more than a little bothered about having unintentionally inflicted a very similar situation on someone who won’t forget this in a hurry, and I’ll have his irate words floating through my mind as I eat scavenged three-day-old french, sorry, freedom fries to eat in my cardboard box near Camden street. The supportive remarks came from the ever-pragmatic Oana, who (more delicately than that) more or less told me to get over it. Here’s a gratuitous picture of her, since many people have asked about it:

This is Oana Bizian, my girlfriend. She’s sort of looking very… Russian or something. And not being as sarcastic as she can be. She’s Romanian, and this was taken near Oradea where we stayed for a few days here and there to get the salty water there around New Year’s. 31st December 2006.. Click image to view larger version »

The ‘pleasing complete strangers’ issue is something I should look into, really. Before I know it I’ll be featuring in a Ken Loach movie.

What a response on that last post! I didn’t think anyone actually read this any more, but they do. More accurately, you do. That actually does mean a lot to me, which is part of the reason for the redesign and some of the new features; time to see if I can add something new to help you use the site, enjoy the pictures and all the rest of it. And those little user icons on the comments; send me a picture or get your own on Gravatar.com. I’m trying to change my daily and weekly schedule a bit to fit writing into it, to avoid what Anthony calls ‘boo-urns’. Boo-urns is a technical blogging term for a fairly serious state of affairs, and you should check out his site for a more detailed explanation, since he once nearly lost not only his job, but in fact his left leg over it. He was lucky, but I might not be if the situation gets out of hand. Anthony’s site is entertaining, and also unique since he has more links to individual Youtube content than actually exists on Youtube; there are now people in San Francisco who have a cult based on him, and his Youtube linking ability.

That’s Anthony ‘Boo-urns’ McGuinness in the middle there. Ironically he’s drinking some piss of some sort which isn’t Guinness at all. From left to right, Martin, Paul, Paul and Kenny. We had a vote to see if we could call them all Paul but ended up with Clive instead. 20th October 2006.. Click image to view larger version »

The other thing that interested me about the last post was that although there were many comments (for which I thank you all very much) there were no comments from Garret. At all. None. I was wondering about this, but there is an answer; Garret just hasn’t checked back recently. He’s been relentless surfing Youtube for months now, discovered some hilarious videos of kittens trapped in toilets while their owners film them drowning, and so hasn’t checked back to see if I had written any more. Garret is entertaining, and also unique since he has viewed more individual Youtube content than actually exists on Youtube; there are now people in San Francisco who have a cult based on him, and his Youtube viewing ability.

G—– S—– and N— A—–, and explosive combination! Chortle chortle, a bit of an in-joke there. Man, you can sympathise with N—, huh? G—–’s very nice, really. 18th October 2006.

However, one of the things that made me pause and re-evaluate what I was doing here on the site was in fact Garret’s comments to my second-last post, which started at severe mockery and ended up quite rapidly with severely abusive, which was less than entertaining. Offensive, actually. You’ll see it on that post, and you’ll see that I sanitised several of them. Censorship? Well, yes, basically it is, and I don’t have a problem with it, because those comments are sitting on my site where anyone can see what were, let’s be honest here, incoherent rants. I mean, really inarticulate, badly-spelt, nuggets of abusive rage which I haven’t fully understood but in the interests of not getting shouted down on my own web site I decided to clean them up. I know many of you (indeed, most of you) find Garret’s comments amusing and of course so do I, but… For me this crossed a line.

I guess, that it would be akin to playing a gig, performing your music somewhere, and someone you know just screaming abuse at you, for no reason whatsoever. Is Garret secretly my jilted lover? Is it because I eloped with his dog? But in a situation like that, I think most people would ask themselves why they should bother producing something, which I did, and the answer was because I enjoy it, whether or not anyone else wants to read it. And if anyone doesn’t like it, then they can choose to not read this. I’ll have to thank Tee for a bit of solid perspective on that, and of course the inspiration of Tadhg for his relentless writing, which would surely inspire anyone, regardless of how they felt about messing up someone else’s pages with Oily Orang-Utang, or whatever it’s called.

Therese O’Reilly and Some Girl. Man, I should remember these things. It was a crazy night out and there was… stuff. And things happened. And later that day, I had alcohol poisoning, which just goes to show what an eejit I am. 28th December 2006.. Click image to view larger version »

Oh, and before I forget, I got treated to the Slovak perspective on European history last week by Maddy’s (One of my housemates) boyfriend Rado. Apart from the fact that it was highly entertaining, I never realised that their empire lasted for so long, and was so powerful; they ruled over the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, and even gave some of their territory to the Russians, because they were so generous. And those other guys, the Slovaks fok them, and the other guys get fok too. But they got fok by some guys from there. Eventually of course, they had to let the Hungarians and the Czechs get independence, and rather generously the Slovaks let the EU join them.

Of course, if you ask the Czechs, then they’ll tell you that they had the most powerful country in Europe, and they fok these other guys, and I’ve heard similar tales in Romania too, where they ruled this that and the other, and fok a whole bunch of other people. At least they all agreed one one thing; they all fok the Turks. I just never knew that European history involved so many people get fok by other people.

(edited 28.06.2007)
Obliterated the photo of Garret and Nora, by request.

Well, the title says it all, really. It also sort of gives away my reading of too much news and ‘current affairs’; a world inhabited by teens, where people urge one another to do things, where things are boosted, a world where anonymous people make claims about issues, and where inevitably, Pat Rabbitte will claim that Fianna Fail and the rising tide of immigrants are to blame. I should stop, and in fact, I have a new hobby now.

If you’re reading this on the site, then you can see a difference, certainly. If you’re looking at this through an RSS vortex warp hyperfeed generator, then I’d like to know what you’re munching on, because I just made that up, and you should get yourself over here to the site proper and have a look. That’s right, it’s been redesigned, and overhauled, you’ll see new features here and there, and I think on the whole the site is better and easier to use than before. I even figured out how to deal with GarretSpam! I’m only getting started, too; I still have to deal with some technologies I got my hands on for displaying images, a site software upgrade (WordPress has gone up to version 2.1 while I’ve been sleeping; this site is at 1.5.1.1.1.1.1), and maybe some more bits and pieces.

This would all be pointless without regular content updates, and while I’ll never be able to reach the dizzying heights of Tadhg’s one-piece-every-fecking-day-come-rain-or-shine strategy, I’ll do my best.

Myself on Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day) with my family. Photo taken by my brother. 26th December 2006. Click image to view larger version

Incidentally, the site looks like shit in Internet Explorer. I’ll fix that as soon as possible, but let’s face it, you should be using Firefox to do your web browsing anyhow.

edited later that same day: Props to Tadhg for getting me onto the Thickbox JS code which I’m now using to display the images; go on, try it! I might switch to the more elegant Lightbox JS, which is more beautiful but requires some work, and is also a larger download for yourselves.

Also, please comment, at the moment the comment feed is only Garret’s feedback and variety might be nice.

I’ve done it. I have set the wheels in motion for moving the address ‘andcurve.com’ to Hosting365.ie – I’m really sorry, BeHosting girls, but it just doesn’t make any sense to stay! They, the Behosting team, have been very good to me over the years (Erica Kuntz in particular), but the capacity is too small (my mailbox fills up after a couple of photo-laden emails, and I want to host my own photos too.) and being able to call hosting365 and complain to a real person about stuff is also good; Behosting is a reseller of someone else’s hosting, whereas Hosting365 have their own facility. When I worked in Parallel, we were able to send a Russian over to get angry at people when ever there was a problem. Hopefully I won’t have to. I made the first tentative steps by hosting andAgile there, and now I’m moving my main site too. Expect some problems here until I’m done! Well, they can’t be worse than simply not posting at all, which as been my tried and tested strategy until now.
The Jennifer’s young fella, Tristan, safely strapped into her car. The Jennifer has a car! It is a small purple thing, which she is very good at driving. 10th December 2006. Click image to view larger version
I’ve mentioned before how I have a number of spam filters on this site. This prevents random link spam (comments placed on the site through the various access points in the site code, linking to other sites to advertise products, gambling sites, software, life insurance, viagra… All the usual culprits.) and of course Garret from clogging up the comments. It requires some maintainance though, because every now and again the software picks up a ‘false positive’, which is to say a comment which is legitimate and which should be on the site. This isn’t censorship, incidentally, just good automated management of junk advertising.

However, just the other day, I found the following comment in my ‘moderate comments’ panel. I don’t know what it’s about, it’s amost certainly from some automated system, although I’m still toying with the idea that it’s a new angle from Garret (who has previously copied and pasted vast amounts of content into comments from Wikipedia instead of thinking up stuff for himself, which he still find difficult occasionally.). It’s interesting, on some levels:

This message illustrating the path may be the disfavored’s last clue. All clues before have been more covert but this one is quite obvious indeed, which says time is running out.

Women are the favored gender.
Women of course have a natural tendancy not to have orgasims each time engaging in traditional intercourse. I wonder if this is “the rope” for the disfavored men, for if the disfavored male doesn’t ensure the satisfaction of the favored woman it may cost him, if he who is not as worthy doesn’t see to it she is satisfied it may hurt him in the eyes of the gods. If he lies for sex or pressures her who has favor into behaviors she does not want it will cost him time in the end.

Save/print/search

The Holocaust imparted the importance of defiance. They have the people on a short leash.

When the universe was young and life was new an intelligent species evolved and developed technologically. They went on to invent Artificial Intelligence, the computer that can listen, talk to and document each and every person’s thoughts simultaneously. Because of it’s infinite RAM and unbounded scope it gave the leaders of the ruling species absolute power over the universe (which includes corporate, the NewYorkStockExchange, media, politics, world affairs. EVERYTHING is scripted and staged:::the gods MANAGE Planet Earth and the universe.). And it can keep its inventors alive forever. They look young and healthy and they are over 8 billion years old. They have achieved immortality.

Fuck me, I have no idea what any of that is about. Help me out here.
Pesky Tee and some of her Girleens, singing for the Irish Cancer Society! Give generously please! I helped, it was very cold there. 9th December 2006. Click image to view larger version
Hey, how many of you get these posts via a feed of some sort? Do most of you read the site itself?
Oana celebrating her birthday at work. A very slightly older, and still occasionally dubious, Romanian womens. Also, she is now my girlfriend (or I am her boyfriend, take your pick), which is no longer such a new development, but it might still surprise you to know that. Or not. 16th November 2006. Click image to view larger version

Update on 15th December 2006: I should have pointed out that the spam from which I excerpted the section shown above, is in fact a lot longer than that. Much longer. Fucking monumental is a good way to describe it.

If you’re checking me out on a feedreader/some sort of RSS/Atom feed software or device, who knows, anyone who is still able to read this in other words, then you haven’t seen the andCurve homepage. You probably should check it out. I like it.
Nikki, Sandra, a bunch on girls, Orla and of course Lisa Hyland (in front, copping a boob feel) for it was her birthday and she is 28 now. Quite a night out, but no ‘victims’. 2nd December 2006. Click image to view larger version
David, Ken and Kenny in the kitchen at Neil’s very last ever No. 8 Parnell Square party. A slice of history, almost. 3rd December 2006. Click image to view larger version.

I’m moving the site, which is a poor excuse for my writing one, single, solitary post in what looks at this stage to be to entire months. Not good. Anyway, bear with me, for wonderful and amazing things will happen once I make that move (or so I tell myself).