DjMagra’s stuff ‘n’ stuff

Ok, I’m not long in from Rosy’s 21st, not much point in me going to bed seen as everyone’s alarms were set for an hour after I got in, so I decided to upload the pictures that I took at the party tonight instead and put them up here.

T’was a great night all in all, I hadn’t seen quite a lot of the folks at it in ages, so was catching up with everyone. Kinda tired as a result now though, leaving shortly, flyuing at 7:30 I think, so hopefully I’ll get a bit of sleep on the plane! Ah well, I’ve got two weeks of holidays to recover anyways!!!

Ooppss , I forgot to mention the other day that Susan and Ian from here in work got engaged recently and kept it all hidden from us for a while, but now we all know and I’d like to wish em all the best!

Heh, got a good email today which was an article taken from the Lonely Planet Guide to Ireland, in which they describe hurling. The full article is available here, but below is a quick excerpt from it.

A hurling match is perhaps the fastest spectator sport in the world (with only ice hockey matching it for up-close frenzy). From a distance it resembles a roaming pack-fight between men with thin pale legs and names like Liam and Sean. At ground level it’s much more frightening, a kind of 15-a-side escape from the asylum.

Ok, am I the only one who thinks this photo looks well dodgy!

U.S. Army Special Janet Sutter of Bloomington, Illinois searches an Iraqi woman at a checkpoint yesterday in Baghdad. The searches in western Baghdad were part of a military sweep in response to a spate of attacks against American soldiers in the area.

I’ve just found out from the BBC Sports page that biking star David Jeffries was killed in an accident today in the Isle of Man, and Jim Moodie was seriously injured in the same crash

Isle of Man TT star David Jefferies has been killed in an accident during a practice session for this year’s races.

Fellow rider Jim Moodie was seriously injured in the same incident, which happened near the village of Crosby.

Jefferies, who was 30, was one of the most successful racers on the island’s Mountain Course.

He had been entered in four races at this year’s TT, riding for the TAS Suzuki team and was gunning for a fourth consecutive treble.

Some things never change, Schumacher is on Provisional Pole for the Grand Prix on Sunday:

Driver Team Fastest Lap Deficit Laps Completed
1 M. Schumacher FER 1:16.305 0.000 3 2 R. Barrichello FER 1:16.636 0.331 3 3 J. Button BAR 1:16.895 0.590 3 4 J. Trulli REN 1:16.905 0.600 3 5 D. Coulthard MLA 1:17.059 0.754 3 6 R. Schumacher WIL 1:17.063 0.758 3 7 G. Fisichella JOR 1:17.080 0.775 3 8 J. Montoya WIL 1:17.108 0.803 3 9 M. Webber JAG 1:17.637 1.332 4 10 N. Heidfeld SAU 1:17.912 1.607 3 11 K. Räikkönen MLA 1:17.926 1.621 3 12 J. Villeneuve BAR 1:18.109 1.804 3 13 R. Firman JOR 1:18.286 1.981 3 14 F. Alonso REN 1:18.370 2.065 3 15 A. Pizzonia JAG 1:18.967 2.662 3 16 J. Verstappen MIN 1:19.421 3.116 3 17 J. Wilson MIN 1:19.680 3.375 3 18 O. Panis TOY 1:19.903 3.598 3 19 C. da Matta TOY 1:20.374 4.069 3 20 H. Frentzen SAU 2

There’s one thing that drives me mad (ok, there’s plenty, but this is one of them!) and that’s journalists writing incorrect technical articles when they really don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. While I admit there are plenty of excellent tech journalists writing for Irish media, there are some that come out with absolute tripe, such as this article in the Sunday Business Post about spoofing.

The author claims that Eircom should be more proactive in monitoring it’s network for customers who have servers dialled up un-wittingly due to customers having mis-configured LAN’s. How can he honestly expect this to be done given A) The resources (in manpower and hardware) required to actively monitor every connection constantly, and B) Given that these problems are caused by incompotence on the behalf of whoever set up the network initially that resulted in spurious traffic being able to bring up an external connection.

Just to highlight the naieveity of the author, here’s an extract from the article:

given that Eircom has top-notch data analysing capabilities on its customers and their habits, could it not be a bit more proactive in taking some action against this type of thing?

Such as looking at business customers’ bills and figuring out that a hefty chunk of internet calls made on weekends and evenings do not generally mesh with business habits in Ireland? In fairness to Eircom, it argues that to do this would be extremely difficult. It has 230,000 ISDN customers.

Some companies in Ireland do work weekends. Given that this problem only occurs with a minority of customers in the first place, how do you discern which company might genuinely be working the weekend between the one which has set up its equipment wrong? Start calling all customers with internet charges on the weekend