Another year done! I'm really pleased with the results - Row and Soy and Nick and AJ and... oooh, everyone!

And as for me... Wow! Thanks to those who voted for me, I'm really chuffed to have won Best Blog Commenter. I can't quite believe I've gone from Laziest Blogger to Best Commenter in twelve months - it's quite odd really!

Thanks again, congratulations to all the other winners, and better luck next year to those who just missed out. Here's to the Bloscars 2009!

I'm so excited I can't concentrate on Masterchuff!

I always told myself that I wouldn't buy an iPhone while they are so new because they are so bloody expensive - I got my Nokia 6300 for free and I love it.

But today it's been confirmed that it will finally be released in Ireland through o2 and the Carphone Warehouse (same as in the UK) on March 14th, and suddenly my ears have perked up. I mean, Landers is working now, we've got some extra cash coming in...

The only thing is, we're getting reamed over here. I mean, in the UK there is a big price difference compared to the US, but the Euro price for the iPhone is reported to be the same as the US price - both are either 399 or 499 depending on storage size, but we have a € instead of a $.

€499 for the 16gb version, which is almost $742! Nearly $250 more! Bastards. Robbing bloody bastards.

Still really want one, though...

I just had an argument in the office. About spelling.

Everyone else, and I mean everyone*, is convinced the word 'definitely' is spelled 'definately'. I want to eat my head.

I showed them the many entries on dictionary.com, the Hungarian lady translated it and couldn't find a word for their spelling, I pointed out that the word is related to definite and finite, and they still insist that their way is the right way, and my way is the American way.

Fools!

* Except the Hungarian lady.

If ever there was a conceptual item that I would love to have, this is it.

It's so cooooool! And hot. And anywhere in between, because it's a tap (that's a faucet to you, Meno)!

The circly bit at the top is a control panel, with grooved channels in it. The ball is the control mechanism. When the ball is in the centre, the water flow is off, and each groove out towards the edge increases the flow rate. The temperature is controlled by moving the ball along the groove, hot on one side, cold on the other. It lights up red for hot, and blue for cold.

Want, want, want!

I never used to pay much attention to my profile tags. I had mostly nice ones, one not so nice, but I've never deleted any of them.

But now, you get a message every time someone tags you, and all that happens is I spend hours wondering who tagged me!

(Thanks, whoever it was!)

Well, he would have done if I'd shown him the lolcats I've made of Max. So here's one of Huw:

That was taken when we brought him home from having his nuts cut. Poor little mite.

On my way home, I saw some new lambs in a field near our house, so I went back with the camera to get some piccies!

They're a bit blurry cos I zoomed right in. This is about the third lot we've had near us, no idea where they keep going...

And finally, another lolcat starring Max:

And because Prison Break is on RTE2 tonight. here's one I stole:

OK, so no phone line installed today.

I phoned after lunch, they have no record of an appointment being booked for this morning, and it's currently forecast to be installed 'by' the 11th March.

Fuckers.

(By the way, Eircom is pronounced "Aircom", so the heading rhymes. Thought I should point that out.)

...that I haven't done a personal post for a while, they've all been "har this is funny" or "look what I found". So I thought I'd write one.

Of course, as soon as I decided to do that, everything I was thinking about writing flew out of my ears.

Work is going well and not well at the same time. I've been given more to do, which means I have less time to do other things, which means my procrastinating ways are catching up with me.

My problem is that I find what I do very easy, and so I think I can do it all in five minutes, which is true of a single thing, but when there are twenty things to do, that makes twenty five minuteses. Or an hour and forty minutes, whichever you prefer.

I need to get out of this habit. I need to do my work as it comes in (he says, blogging with three quotes and an order to process, a website to update and a job description to write).

I have been given a small payrise to recognise the extra work I'm supposed to be doing and as an incentive to be more proactive sales-wise, so I will certainly give it a go.

At home, things are good. We love our house, we spend our weekends doing what we like (which is nothing, more often than not) and we have each other for company. Perfect.

Money is tight, Landers is still jobhunting, but the bills are being paid which is the main thing. Not having any spare cash for fun things gets us down every now and then, but apart from that I've got no complaints. I think as soon as we have some spare cash, a trip out to Pizza Express for my birthday will cheer me up no end.

We're supposed to be having the phone line fitted today, but they didn't turn up this morning. I'll leave it til after lunch and give them a call. Bastards. It'll be nice to have that sorted, so we can speak to family and friends in the UK more often. I've not spoken to any of my friends since Christmas! It'll be good to have proper broadband at home too, although it's not a priority unfortunately. Might have to wait a few weeks for that.

So, nothing too exciting happening (apart from some visitors in May! Yay!). And we've got a couple of trips away, Glasgow and Berlin, which we're looking forward to.

One last thing, I'm sure everyone on my friends list knows anyway but don't forget about the bloscars - the deadline for votes is 8pm on Thursday 28th! Come on, if you like my monkey/giraffe/disco duck, you know what to do!

Have fun go mad, and all that jazz. Normal service (ie posting random crap rather than real stuff) will be resumed shortly.

My first lolcat! This is my cat Max, He doesn't normally squint like that. I don't think he likes the flash.

Happy birthday Row! I searched for "chocolate man" and this is what came up. He's all yours!

I love spoonerisms.

For some reason, I started thinking about a friend of mine who once accidentally said "hypodeemic nerdle" instead of hypodermic needle. It always makes me giggle like a little girl even if I'm somewhere public, and I have to really concentrate if I need to say it now because it's like I'm infected, and I can't say it right either. It just sounds so ridiculous!

I found a website full of em.

Phoenix82 was looking for something to do, and I remembered a weird and wonderful flash game I played once. I went to look for the link, couldn't find it, but in the course of my googling I found this instead.

It's some sort of BBC tie-in to the Rome series they did, with a mystery to be solved. I can't play it properly because I've got no sound at work I'm far too busy, but it's really well made.

You have to click on things and follow a trail of clues. Take a look!

http://cdx-thegame.com/

Yeah, right. I'm still Laziest Blogger until the end of the month.

I'm really enjoying reading everyone elses though, the only thing is that there's so much to go through! I haven't commented much, mainly because I've been really busy at work today, but I'll get round to it I'm sure!

In other news, Soy, we are so going here:

CLICKY

I hadn't checked Something Awful for a while, so I just went for a look.

If you don't know, they do something called Photoshop Phriday each week - they have a subject for photo editing, people submit pictures, and the best ones are shown on the website.

Last week's subject was "Switcheroo!" - swapping famous people's faces around. There are some obscure American ones, some really good ones, but this one is fantastic!

Take a look - CLICKY!

Also worth a look this week is their collection of office pranks. Some great ideas there!

As part of BBC3's re-branding (which I so don't like, by the way) there was a new programme on last night called "Being Human".

From the adverts, I thought it was a comedy, but although there were funny moments it was more of a drama than anything. It's about three main characters. Early on in the episode, the first two - a vampire and a werewolf - decide to rent a house together. It's not long afterwards that the third character crops up, the ghost of a girl who lived in the house before she died.

Sounds a bit odd, I know, but some of it was brilliant! It's a bit like the Munsters meets This Life. All the characters have angst and they're helping each other deal with it. The werewolf, for example, contracted lycanthropy two years previously and had to sever all ties with his family for fear of harming them. They think he's dead, which he's dealing with pretty well until he bumps into his ex-girlfriend.

The ghost in particular is very funny. She's all northern, likes making cups of tea, and is a little bit agoraphobic because she doesn't know what will happen if she leaves the house. They do manage to get her to the pub down the street, but she insists on sitting in the seat nearest to the house. They're sat round the table and one of them says "So if you were at Hogwarts, which house would the Sorting Hat put you in?"

Her answer was something like "I've always quite fancied Hufflepuff. It seems like they just make stuff with safety scissors and glitter all day."

The only character I didn't like was the vampire. He's a bit... obvious. He's thin and pale, and flouncy, and aloof, and a wanker. Maybe he'll get better as the show progresses. There was some awful acting from a couple of the other vampires we meet, too.

As it's on BBC3 it'll be repeated all week, and if you're in the UK you can see it on iPlayer too (until Sunday, anyway). Take a look, it's worth it. Next episode is on Monday.

Clicky for the full size version:

(received in an email, but then I saw it on Gizmodo)

...that when I got home at lunchtime, Landers was listening to Jimmy Somerville...

He's definitely gay.

This weekend, our telly was mostly going "Yah! Oo-hoo! YAAAAHOOO!" as I triple jumped (triple-jamp?) my way through Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii.

I'm having lots of super jolly fun, running around like a loony (several times falling off edges into black holes), bouncing off monsters, collecting things and having a great time exploring the odd gravity effects. There are loads of planets and asteroids to fly between, and you sort of switch orientation depending on which is nearer to you. It's a bit brain melty, but it's great fun to do a running jump off the edge of a platform, not knowing exactly where you're going to land.

Enjoying it muchly.

I uploaded an animated gif I found for use as a profile pic, but the sizes are all wrong so it doesn't work.

It really made me giggle, so I'm sharing it here for all to see and marvel at. Or not.

EDIT: The fantastic Mr Fox Spencer fixed it for me! I now have a lovely new profile pic.

Thank crunchy it's Friday! Home in 40 minutes. Finishing early due to no-lunchingness.

So, here we go!

What five things are you grateful for today and why?

1. I'm grateful for sales meetings that run longer than expected
They let me go home early and have a hug.

2. I'm grateful for having a nice boss
She has wangled an extra Euro an hour for me if I meet targets for the next month.

3. I'm grateful for weekends
Cos I love my bed.

4. I'm grateful for BCUK
It gives me something to do when I should be working.

5. I'm grateful for having an understanding boyfriend
Cos I'm gonna be spending every possible moment playing Super Mario Galaxy this weekend...

...today at 12.

Gotta do a report.

It's going to be very short.

He put me in a LOLcat kind of mood.

moar lolcats

I have been desperate for a wee all morning. Five minutes ago I decided that I could hold it no longer and resigned myself to a trip to the murky gloom that is the gents.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they have been cleaned!

Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure they still constitute a serious health hazard, but they are about a gajillion times better than they normally are! You can see the floor tiles are supposed to be white! There's no pool of wee by the urinals!

Compared to previous trips, it was a pleasant experience. I wonder how long it will last...

My next fishtank. If it wasn't only a design concept.

Actually, I bet it's a bugger to clean...

Found on Gizmodo.

...aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Although we are very skint, we went window shopping last week.

There is a computer game shop in Galway called Gamestop and they are ridiculously expensive. However, they do allow you to swap two old Wii games for a new one!

Landers has just been in and swapped Kororinpa (a cutesy marble rolling game I finished in about 20 minutes. Well, ok, more like two days, but it was the last few levels, they were real bastards!) and Far Cry (a runny round shoot people game that gave me motion sickness and hence I rarely played it) for...

Super Mario Galaxy! YES! I've been wanting it for months!

Now I've just got to fight Landers for control of the telly...

Since this is a computer game related post, I should post my favourite game character like other people did the other day and I didn't cos I was far too hungover/busy/lazy.

I thought about Mario, but no. Sonic is just annoying with his silly 'victory' sign in Sonic 2. Kratos from God of War was a strong contender, but he's a bit thick. Link from Zelda almost got it, cos I love the Zelda games, yes, even the second one.

So who will it be?

Yes, it's Raziel from the Legacy of Kain games. He looks cool, he's got a glowy sword and he's immortal. I almost chose Kain himself, but he's fugly and a bit mean too.

Being fairly skint lately, we’ve been watching a lot of TV. We have a schedule.

Tuesday consists of Eastenders on BBC1, followed by Natureshock on 5, then Prison Break on RTE2 (an Irish channel), and finally Medicine Men Go Wild on 4+1 (perhaps with a little Family Guy on BBC3 before bed).

Natureshock has been a pretty good series. They take a stange occurrence in the animal kingdom and treat it like a CSI sort of thing. The first one we saw was a strange corpse that had been found in the Everglades. It was revealed to be two corpses – a massive snake and an alligator. But had the snake killed the alligator or had the alligator killed the snake? Well, a bit of both, obviously. The snake (a Burmese python, probably an ex-pet released into the wild when it got too big) had killed and eaten the alligator, which was too big and had burst out of the snake’s belly, killing it. Simple, really.

Over the weeks, we’ve seen bear cannibalism, 'zombie' crocodiles and last night jellyfish swarms.

Last night's programme was amazing. Not so much of a CSI style murder investigation as the others have been, but more an analysis of what’s going on with jellyfish.

The really interesting bits included the fact that scientists have recently discovered that jellyfish (certainly box Jellyfish anyway, not sure about other types) have eyes! Looking at them, they look totally transparent and you’d think they were eyeless – as everyone did until last year. Each corner of a box jellyfish has six eyes! That’s 24 in total! Only eight of them are sophisticated, the others only sense light and shadow, but the other eight are actually quite complicated and see very well, better than many fish, even compensating for refraction from objects above the water, enabling them to navigate using landmarks when close to shore!

Not only that, but they also have four brains, one in each corner, and they each work their own set of eyes. They compete with each other for control of the body depending on what they see. The one nearest the fish wins the fight! They actively hunt, they don't just wait for something to come near.

They showed an experiment with a box jellyfish in a tank. They put two white poles in the tank, and the jellyfish bumped into them and knocked them over. They put black poles in, and it navigated happily around them. So they can't see white very well, but black is no problem.

Then they put red poles in, and the behaviour totally changed. It kept as far away as it could, right in the corner of the tank. This research has led to changes like making nets around beaches red to deter jellyfish from even coming near them.

Fascinating stuff. They showed the jellyfish lifecycle too. The fertilised eggs drop to the sea bed and become little 'polyps' stuck to rocks and things, feeding on plankton that passes by. They can stay like that for years, and then suddenly they change – nobody knows exactly what causes it – and the polyp clones itself again and again, and the clones floats away. The clones develop into new jellyfish! The polyps end up looking like a little stack of jellyfish before they float off, one by one.

The Japanese government tried to control a swarm of massive 2m wide jellyfish off their coast by sending out boats with nets made of sharpened steel wire, which they dragged through the swarm to cut the jellyfish into pieces.

Somehow the surviving jellyfish knew what had happened, and compensated by going into a breeding overdrive – each producing millions of eggs! Many times more than they normally produce.

There was loads more in the programme, such as the absolutely tiny jellyfish that you can't see in daylight that can kill you, but I think I've probably bored you enough now. If you happen to see it repeated, it's well worth a look.

EDIT:

It's definitely only box jellyfish that have the sophisticated eyes, and it was 2005 when the research was done, not last year. So there.

Isn’t it sickening how some peop