Posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 6:06 pm by Philip Devitt
It was a spare of the moment decision; should I go home, or should I pop around and see my old friend Cllr Mullen. As it happens I was quite lucky to just catch him coming home from the Labour Conference. With great excitement he informed me that for the last couple of days he’d been hanging around with the stars of Emmerdale and Coronation Street as well as those two shifty blokes named Blair and Brown. Forgetting about foreign policy or the state of the economy, his primary concern was who’s sleeping with who in Emmerdale.
The councillor yesterday experienced a few more of his 15 minutes of fame when a cunningly placed sign with the daubing “Pick Me” held above John’s head, was picked out by the host. If someone can find a clip of his moment of fame (repeated on BBC Parliament, apparently) please forward it on.
It looks like Hannah has finally got a date for her Christening; unfortunately the original choice of Godmother will be out of the country for the actual event (bobbing around the US and generally getting up to no good) so it looks like Hannah will be the lucky owner of two Godmothers — one who will be at the event, and another who’ll be there in spirit. From a Godfather perspective this is quite a good turn of events, ’cause it means there will have to be two booze-up’s — thus doubling the opportunity to get them very, very drunk… (only kidding S & K 
)
Of course the drinking is not the only reason for the ceremony, the real reason is to provide the child with a moral and spiritual rolemodel. As part of the Christening deal, the little churub has to be presented to a congregation eager to take on fresh blood; this basically involves carting her down to church and hoping that she doesn’t decide to scream the place down.
In recent years I’ve only been to church on a few occasions; christenings, weddings, funerals, bahmitzvahs (strike that last one) — I don’t believe that going to a large hall every week and praying to a God automatically makes you a better person; for the faithful, your reward will be based on how you lived your life, and how you treated others, not by how closely you follow religious dogma. The most prominant reason for not turning up for regular mass was recalling the hours of fire & brimstone given by past priests. So I was rather surprised that the current priest made the hour long service fly-by — at one point I did actually check the clock to see if I’d really been there an hour. The resident GJ (God-Jockey) Fr Manock should be praised for the upbeat manner in which he puts across God’s message, especially his use of song during the service. For those wishing to find out more about the ministry, and especially those wishing to donate to the “New Church” appeal, please visit www.radcliffecatholic.org.
Posted on Sunday, September 3rd, 2006 at 12:35 pm by admin
It’s been a while since I last did any real coding; I’ve found that doing it for a living somewhat interferes with those creative juices that are needed to oil the thinking process. Anyway, I’ve been inspired by an interesting web site www.oceangram.com into writing a simple “message in a bottle” type random chat client that can be added to any web site. If you want to play around with it just drop me a note and I’ll send you the code you need to paste into your webpage. The client is inobtrusive, if you want to send a message just key it into the text box in the top right of this page and press the send button. You will be told if there is a message waiting for you, to read it just click on the “message available” text.
Also on the theme of new stuff, my sister eventually did hatch, not the 6/6/06 as predicated but a few days later. Here’s an “arty” black and white photo of Hannah.
**UPDATE**: The Javascript chat client has been removed after I noticed it was slaughtering my webserver… Methinks it’ll need a bit of recoding
Posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 9:01 pm by Philip Devitt
Another weekend is over and we’re steam-rollering into the summer season — it’s not that I hate summer time, far from it, the longer, brighter days are a lot less miserable than the winter equivalent, its just that with the sun comes exhaustingly hot days, sleepless sweaty nights and a new wave of those little buzzing bleeders know as wasps.
There’s nothing worse than waking up to *that* humming noise, and listening intensly to try and figure out where it is and more importantly which way its heading. I know they are smaller than me and that the harm they could do would be short lived, its just a matter of the inconveniance of finding a slipper/newspaper/book and clearing the resultant mess made when its tiny body is rapidly introduced to my weapon of choice and the window.
Of course, wasps aren’t the only creature to come out at summer. I’ve also got to contend with ants, flying ants, arrogant little bleeders that stubbornly try to invade the house every year. Nothing stops ‘em, not bleach, not ant powder, possibly not even molten lava, though I’ve not got any actual lava to test the theory.
Speaking of hot places, the Australian government announced last 
week that they are to allow any holiday workers to apply for up to a years extension to their visa if they spend part of their time working within certain seasonal and agricultural sectors. Full details of the Australian visa extension scheme are available on the BBC’s website.
Posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 1:16 am by Philip Devitt
It’s been over a fortnight since a bout of “man-flu” knocked me for six, infact there was a half written blog that I’ve just deleted which I never got around to completing or publishing while attempting to stem the river of mucus that seemed to eminate from most of my front facing orafices - it was not a pleasant sight to behold. In typical fashion I only really started to feel better on the Sunday evening which pretty much meant that my Friday night and Saturday were ruined; being ill on work time is almost forgivable, but being ill on my own time ? Obviously these bugs have NO sense of fairplay.
I’ve been trying, and may I add failing, to do less geek-like things; for some reason I have a strange notion that building a distributed filesystem similar to the one used by Google is the way of the future and have in some small way been trying to emulate the filey goodness of the Lord Google using the Java language. My first port of call was obviously to see what else was out there by using that most hallowed of search engines, the Good Lord Google itself. Surprisingly enough some people have tried something similar, the Nutch project attempts to implement an entire Google-like search engine, complete with it’s own distributed filesystem and distributed processing model. Quite how successfully it implements it I’m not really prepared to say, but I’ve not managed to get the distributed file system to work in any sensible manner.
St. Patrick’s night was the final nudge which tipped me off the waggon; how selfish of an entire nation to coerce me into buying and consuming pint after pint of their finest stout ale. I suppose it was a good excuse to go and see my old friend and favourite web enterpreneur at his local Irish club. It was during this meeting that we came across the idea of creating little pixel banner adverts somewhat similar to the Million Dollar Website idea. An example of the idea can be seen at the top of the side bar to the right.
Posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 12:29 am by Philip Devitt
This weekend saw the first “Febfest” beer festival in Bury, obviously I had to check it out !
I think everyone has an idea of who goes to beer festivals. We’re talking beardy, hairy-bellied blokes who like nothing more than sitting on wooden benches eating tepid meat pies and getting gently poached drinking potent urine coloured liquids. The more cynical minded would also suggest that said liquids probably tasted like urine, and were most likely sourced at the previous weeks beardy gathering. But that’s by-the-by, and considering I did drink a few half’s I’d like to think that the stuff in the barrels had come from a far better place than the dodgy portaloo’s outside the main tent.
Yes, beardy blokes were there, it was to be expected, nay, required. They added a certain ambience to the place, helped complete the picture as it were. The whole setup of the festival seemed a little odd, you had to pay admission and buy “beer tokens” for a pound a go at the old railway ticket booth then you had to wander over to the tent to pick up your glass. It wasn’t until I actually entered the tent that I discovered why the “beer token” method of payment was chosen instead of the cold hard cash approach. Those serving the beer were quite rightfully also enjoying the odd half, and while none of them were staggering around I got the impression that performing any correct change calculation above and beyond 1 token=1/2 pint could cause a little trouble, especially when the customers were also well on the way to the “hangover hotel”.
Once inside the tent you were greeted by what can only be described as an “Ale’ing wall”, around 100 barrels of various alcoholic mixtures sat in rows three high across the longest side of the tent. Infront of the barrels were the defenders of the kegs, beardy blokes who have sworn to protect their precious from anyone who doesn’t brandish the sacred token of pintage. Most of the beardies gathered in nodding herds, to each herd was appointed a female, who suprisingly didn’t have a beard, well, not a publicly visible one at any rate. It was only after half an hour did I realise our little group was forming its own herds, quite spooky.
After tasting my way through several ales, and a rather weak tasting (yet highly intoxicating) cider I came to the conclusion that my favourite ale was the Black Witch from Moorhouse’s — please follow the link for locations of stockists and pubs where you can find this fine beverage.
For those living in the Bury area I’ll save you a click-though, the nearest pub is the Dusty Miller, Crostons Road.