Past Diatribes

Diploma firmly in my hand, I can proudly announce that I am now an official Computer Programmer. The classes wrapped up there at Dorset College on the morning of Ray’s wedding, the 24^th of July. I donned my tin of fruit (that’s Dub for "a suit"), headed The Bubble toward town, and let its half litre roar. (It’s a good little car, that Nissan Micra. They look like there’d be a pair of hamsters under the hood, running in a little wheel, and maybe room enough in the cabin for two more to sit comfortably. Nevertheless, the yokes have proved to be deft and reliable, roomy enough inside and dead handy to park. You see Bubbles all over the roads in Ireland, and rightly so.) I’d cracked the final project using Borland’s Turbo C++ Lite on my laptop at home, over the week before, and quickly got it up and running on Borland 5. I admit, there was a bead or two of sweat getting the "dialects" (slight variations in the computer language) to match and the program to work, but she was running along, saved on a disk, printed out and handed in with plenty of time to leg it back to Palmerstown, wink at my nervous babe and eat a finger sandwich before the limo pulled up and the wedding party took off. I hate cutting things that close (realistically, half an hour), but what needs to be done has to be done. Ditto goes for the nights ‘til midnight that whole week before, hammering away so I had the program running, debugged, and even all the layout pretty and spelling checked before Saturday. It wasn’t much fun, but I knew I’d need to have it ready to roll. What had to be done, had to be done.

The wedding itself was a blast. Ray and Darina got themselves hitched in this beautiful church in Rathfarnum. Conveniently right across the road, I might add, from an excellent pub called the Yellow House. We all ducked in there for a quick one before the ceremony. It’s a great thing how a nice Guinness can calm the nerves. Then for the dinner and the afters, following the ceremony, it was off to a hotel called Jury’s in Ballsbridge. There were a million mates and relatives and next thing I knew, it was dawn and the taxi was stopping outside the little house that Carmel and I bought almost exactly one year ago. Quite a good day, Ray and Darina, but a tough act for the two of us to follow. Good thing we’re already making the preparations for next April, and hiding a few surprises up our sleeves.

I am still pushing for an Elvis Impersonator to perform us a set, after the normal band calls it quits.

There’s a lot of other news, a lot of things going on to keep us all busy over here. We saw - and actually very much enjoyed- Notting Hill at Liffey Valley Shopping Centre’s new 14 screen multiplex cinema. The McDonald’s-ization continues full force: by that I mean the whole world beginning to look like America. Sharp readers will recall last month’s observation that the Internet has tacked the US firmly beneath its cover. This case in point: the new cinema has its own website. Another case, at the same shopping centre (Ok, Mall-- third case) there’s a new Gateway Country Store just like the 170 all over the states, next to all theBarnes and Nobles and Starbucks.

I’ve gone from being a Gateway employee to being a Gateway enthusiast, I’ve got to be saying. Monday last, I went home with a carload of cowspots for myself. Call me a geek but I was all excited the whole week before. I’d shopped around, did my math, and custom configured it. I tracked its course through our System 21 program, from Stat 2 to Stat 3 to Stat 4. MICK’S SYSTEM. The system custom built for Mick! Just like in the adverts. They don’t let you roll up your sleeves and actually build it yourself, because some guy reportedly nicked £27 Grand worth of hardware he didn’t purchase before they caught him--- lousy bastard. Anyway, I’ve been down there before, on the factory floor, watching how they put them together. The construction procedure has come literally leaps and bounds: they’ve got so many checks and re-checks, I maintained full confidence that they’d put mine together right. And they did. And then it was ready, and Carmel and I went down to the factory outlet and picked it up!

The 486 has gone into its well-deserved retirement.

I chose a nice Pentium III system, figured 450 MHz was fast enough for my now and foreseeable needs. 6.8GB Quantum Corona Hard Disk and 64MB of SDRAM. I reckon that by Christmas, the way prices are dropping, I’ll be able to pick up cheap substantially more of both just as I’m really beginning to feel me toes outgrowing what I’m running in now. DVD—haven’t scoped a flick yet, but my mate Rob tells me they’re brilliant. Basic 17" monitor, 16MB of ATI Rage 3D video- that’s enough, I’m not a big gamer. I’ve got to say, though, these new Pentium III instructions paired with only that hardware-- ! (I feel like I’ve just exploded out of Plato’s cave, the difference in the exact same program running on the IBM and this new system!) 100MB Zip drive backing up all my precious info, PCI sound card, 56Kbps modem with free Internet, minitower case--- I’m getting me a scanner next month, £64 cheap from Electric World, and I’ll be as happy as Fred.

Now please don’t send me any irate mail, to the hotmail account below, about how your daughter or neighbour or maiden aunt with her mouldy buck teeth got a Gateway and the monitor crapped out after a two years and they wouldn’t replace it, being outside its warranty. Just so no one thinks they’ve stumbled onto some lowbred marketing scam camouflaged as a kick-ass cool website, allow me to say that you would probably be just as happy with a Compaq or a Dell or HP, ICL, IBM or other new brand-name machine. And with mine just like any of those others, there were some teething pains that first week. (That resulted from crap software, free-sampler-that-came-with-an-Internet-mag variety. Not just non-critical bugs like spelling errors, either--- once you start looking, it’s amazing how much capriciously buggy stuff is floating around out there.) I’m just speaking for myself on this issue, and say that so far I have been entirely happy with the new computer.

Two last things, one flowing seamlessly from the "totally happy" theme and then a conclusion diving clear the opposite. Last weekend Carmel and I took a little roadtrip down to County Wexford in The Sunny Southeast, and did a little camping on Morriscastle Strand. Walked into Kilmuckridge and enjoyed £2 pints at a lounge singalong, bounced the Coast Road into Courtown, dug eating ice cream and spending an hour losing and winning and losing again £1’s worth of 2p’s on slots and games of chance. Strolled by the pier. Awed the blazing Milky Way. Brilliant. I feel cheered for the first time since realising this whole Dublin life has been a fraud relying on ignorant bliss, just humming along to tunes broadcast in my sad little dream world. For the last year I have been billing myself quite proudly, you see, as the man owning Dublin’s Only Toaster Oven. Well, that came crashing to an end one day recently at the Superquinn in Northside Shopping Centre. There was this lady in an apron and cap, handing out free samples, shiny little sausages kept warm. . . It’s so terrible I cannot bear to write about it.

Peace.