Flour Power

Last Friday I was invited by Nuno and Ana for a get-together at their place. The plan included playing poker and testing the recently bough Nintendo Wii. That sounded nice, and after dinner I grabbed the six-pack of Tuborg and headed there, which takes less than 5 minutes walking from where I’m living.

We started off with the Wii, playing “Super Smash Bros” like maniacs, since no one knew how to really play it and so it was basically a button bashing competition. Just when I was getting the hang of it (after reading the instructions book), the poker session started. There were quite a lot of us (more than 10) so the players were split into two tables. I ended up not playing poker both because there was no money involved (and that kind of ruins the purpose of it), but mostly because I was really interested in fiddling around with the Wii.

So while the others were winning small pots with 4-of-a-kind right after checking the rule book to make sure that it was a good combination, I was happily competing with Ana in “Wii Sports”. It had been a long time since I had done some exercise…

All in all the night was good fun. The wine, beer and snacks were really good, but the best of all were the Pastéis de Bacalhau that Ana cooked herself with real (salted) codfish brought from Portugal. And the multilingual environment was great. I got to make fun of the Italian way of speaking, have some fun with the eSpanish accent and practice my French pick-up sentences (you don’t want to know which ones…).

It’s part of the Coraline movie promotion, debuting on the 6th of February, which is inspired in a book by Neil Gaiman himself. Ever wondered what koumpounophobia is? Neil answers.

(Via Neil Gaiman’s Journal)

One of Ireland’s biggest ISP’s, Eircom, signed an agreement with the four major record labels in which it agreed to disconnect customers if they illegally download music. This came as a result of a lawsuit initiated by EMI Ltd., Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music and Warner Music Group Inc. (via the Irish Recorded Music Association – IRMA) in which the labels wanted Eircom to install network monitoring equipment. The offenders will be given two warnings before being shut down.

So now, instead of having to go to court to get an order asking the ISP to shut off a subscriber’s connection, the music labels will directly to the ISP, making the whole process much faster. And the record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements with other ISPs in Ireland, although there are no signs of that for now.

Now let’s be realistic. Illegal downloads will not stop. Ever! So why do they even bother? I think it’s quite easy to understand that music sales will not rise because of this. People who download illegal music wouldn’t buy it anyway, and there’s the even the chance that music downloads increase record sales. That’s what far smarter people than me have been saying for a while.

Anyway, the existence of quite a large number of alternatives might eventually make Eircom change their mind, or at least place some effort in trying to avoid shutdowns by being especially strict about the evidence presented by the labels. I guess they don’t want their customers running away to their competitors.

So much hype about this being a big thing, but I don’t think it will really make any difference.

I’ve just seen the first episode of the fifth season of Lost that aired last wednesday. And although I’m a bit disappointed, that didn’t really surprise me.

It’s just that it keeps getting weirder and weirder. What’s up with making the plot more complicated in each and every episode? What about finishing up on some stuff before moving along? I miss “The X-Files” (the first few seasons), where most episodes had all kinds of bizarre stuff happening but in the end everything was wrapped up and explained. The explanations were always quite… “supernatural”, but at least they didn’t leave us wondering what the hell just happened and salivating for next week’s episode in the hopes of getting some answers. And people kept coming back to watch it next week anyway.

Getting back to the season premiere, we do get some answers on this episode (or maybe just one), but those answers come at a cost… You guessed it, more questions! I don’t want to reveal any spoilers… but I don’t like the direction where this is heading, with so many time-travel-related stuff. It never works out! It always makes everything too confusing and most of the times completely incongruous. I only remember it working out well a few times, like in “Back to the Future” and “The Butterfly Effect”. I don’t even want to get started on how wrong it’s working on “Heroes”…

Anyway, I was a bit afraid of what might show up in this fifth season and episode 1 just made me confirm that I only keep watching this show because I’m too stubborn to stop after I’ve watched the previous 4 seasons. I mean, there has to be some kind of unifying story behind all of it. Although I’m really starting to doubt it will make any sense at all.

Oh well, at least I still have stuff like “How I Met Your Mother”, “The Big Bang Theory” and “Californication” that continue to be a lot of fun to watch.

Yesterday was the end of my first week here in Galway, and I think a brief summary is in order. I’ll jump to the fun part in a moment because I don’t want to bore you with the work details. I just want to mention that I’ve been very well received by my boss and all the co-workers, and that the work is running smoothly.

Now for the fun part, some numbers:

• 10+ street musicians, including: a saxophone player, a guy playing acoustic guitar under a shop’s door frame, a guy playing Green Day’s “Basket Case” on an electric guitar (with some kind of portable amplifier), and some blokes with a drumset!
• 6 pints of Guinness (I plan on keeping a counter on these);
• 6 pubs visited;
• 0 zebra crossings spoted;
• 100+ girls with short skirts spoted, even though it’s always about 5ºC and raining most of the time;
• 5 minutes of sun exposure;
• (X – 5) * 0,9 minutes of rain exposure (approximately), where X is the total number of minutes I spent on the street;
• 0 square centimeters of dry asphalt seen;
• 6 Portuguese people met;
• 6 trips to the supermarket (that’s what happens when you don’t have a car to carry everything in one go).

And since I like statistics, I started using Buxfer to register all the money I spend and get reports that will help me understand where all the money is going, because otherwise I may go bankrupt from all the money spent on vegetables and fruit… I’ll post some results of this experiment when I have some more data.

I’m also promising to share some of the hundreds of short skirts with you all, as a special “gift” to those living in countries much warmer than Ireland and still the girls have more clothes on than an Eskimo (yes, Portugal is in that group).

Over and out!