Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
New car
Monday, February 19th, 2007
My old Ford Focus, that has carried my fat ass up and down to Dublin for the last 3 years is being put out to pasture. It’ll be spending the rest of it’s days doing school runs and trips to the shops with the missus. I need something with a bit of comfort, so I’ve found a Volvo S80 for myself. It’s bigger (a lot bigger!) and more comfortable, and it doesn’t start to wheeze going up steep hills.
It looks like a bit of an old man’s car, but it’s 2 litre turbo’ed engine will leave a lot of the boy racers in their Honda Civics behind. The top end stereo and heated leather seats mean I’ll be comfortable doing it.
Who needs sleep when you can take a pill?
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006
The New Scientist is running an article on new methods of staying awake longer, and conceivably in the future skipping sleep entirely for short periods. Today we rely on caffeine, nicotine or pills and powder to keep us alert into the night or get us back up and functional after a short sleep. The downside is the eventual crash. We don’t eliminate sleep, we just postpone it. I’ve lost count of the all nighters and 80+ hour weeks that have resulted in me going to bed on Friday evening and not surfacing until Sunday afternoon.
Modafinil, a drug initially created to combat narcolepsy (where you spontaneously fall asleep during the day, often at inappropriate times), is promising 36+ hours of wakefulness followed by 8 hours of sleep, or the ability to function long term on 5 hours a night. Could we soon end up only sleeping on the weekends? I can see college students loving this when exam time looms!
Wanker!
Monday, September 11th, 2006
I took the kids to the local McDonalds over the weekend because we got home late, and I just needed to get them fed and put to bed. The place was virtually empty, so imagine my annoyance when this knuckle dragger pulled in…. There was an entire car park to abandon his banged up truck, and he chooses to abandon it in the disabled parking space. If you look at the picture, you can see that not content with taking up one spot, he’s parked across both of them. It almost makes me wish he had to get around in a wheelchair for a while so he might give a shit about people other than himself. Bastard!!!