How many men does it take to get a free pizza?

Last week, I got a Chicago Town BBQ Meat Madness Pizza. [This is going somewhere - my blog hasn't quite stooped to that level yet..]

I noticed that there was a problem with the cooking instructions on the packaging, so I showed it to my housemate - let's call him Mega.

Fans of Celsius will notice that the listed temperature is about 100 degrees less than it ought to be 

Mega was aghast. "That's despicable, unfathomable, improbable, outrageous! You have to complain."

Not really bothered, I told him he could do it on my behalf, and thought nothing of it.

He had sent the e-mail alright, but his sense of outrage and self-entitlement was clearly not evident. He opened by describing himself as a "huge fan", mentioned that "the pizza was great", and concluded by saying that he "just wanted to highlight this error to prevent a mix up and ensure everyone can enjoy this high quality product".

The response came through first thing the next morning, and would certainly be disappointing for anybody hoping for a truckload of compensatory pizzas to show up outside the house:

Hello,

Thank you for highlighting the error with the cooking instructions, feedback and comments are always appreciated, we are aware of this error and it has now been corrected by our printers.

Thank you for sending the packaging details so we are able to track this error.

[In case you're wondering, I didn't censor Mega's name there - the customer service rep didn't even bother to copy/paste his name into the boilerplate message]

Crestfallen, Mega expressed his disappointment to his work colleague, who tutted at his lack of savvy, and lectured him on the rules of engagement with companies, repeating the mantra "the shy baby gets no sweets".

The promulgator of peculiar idioms sat down in front of Mega's computer, and fired off a quick e-mail under Mega's identity:

Thank you very much for your swift reply. However this error was found too late. Unfortunatly, being unaware of this issue. We cooked the pizza at 90 degrees and were very ill afterwards. Please let me know what you plan on doing to rectify this situation?

Continuity be damned! He didn't care that Mega had earlier said that the pizza that made him "very ill" was "great" - he wanted to see what kind of stuff was there for the taking!

That e-mail was sent on Friday afternoon, but no reply came. The spectacular response time only seemed to apply to customers who where spinally-challenged. No word came on Monday or Tuesday, but then, on Wednesday, a letter arrived at our house from the Chicago Town Pizza overlords:

The letter said many things, mostly assuring Mega that he couldn't have gotten sick from eating a badly cooked pizza:

All our pizzas are produced from high quality microbial tested raw materials. In addition this this, all products produced within the factory are tested on a daily basis. This testing is carried out and recorded for both pathogenic, i.e. food poisoning bacteria, and nonpathogenic bacteria and all of the test results were fine […] even if the product was undercooked there would be no reason that this would cause sickness. [...] Illness caused from eating unwholesome food can take varying times to occur, up to a period of 72 hours after eating the product, this does make it difficult to identify the cause.

The letter was clearly from a template to deal with the loons and goons who claimed to have been poisoned by Dr Oetker products, but it did include one voucher for a free Chicago Town pizza (worth €4.50!) and two Ristorante pizzas (worth €2.00!).

Look! The voucher even includes life advice! [Underline added]

€9.50 worth of free pizza? Well worth being a total sphincter in an e-mail, if you ask me.

It just goes to show me that if you want anything in life, you have to bitch and moan and be an insufferable asshole until somebody decides they can't take it anymore and does whatever it takes to get you to shut the fuck up. Or, as the old saying goes: "The shy baby gets no sweets".

Misadventures in Twitter

I signed up for Twitter at the same time as a few of my friends, but six months later, few of them are tweeting regularly - indeed, some of them haven't done anything on Twitter since that first week of use. After lamenting at @jmeehan5's lack of tweeting, he scoffed at what a pointless waste of time Twitter was - my response was an unsure "I've found uses for it", but I didn't have any examples to hand.

I've been on twitter since March, and according to my profile page, I've posted 201 tweets, follow 50 users, and have 43 followers (I gave up on pruning the spammers over a month ago). As is typical of this misanthropic blogger, I've engaged little with other Twitterers - only partly because I'm not entirely au fait with the lingo and etiquette, yet I've found uses for Twitter that no other web service (that I'm aware of ) can match:

Manual Videogame Matchmaking

Since getting a decent broadband connection I've been enjoying online gaming on my Xbox 360, and when my friends aren't in the mood for a game, it's rarely difficult to get a game going with randomers since most developers appreciate how difficult it is for gamers to make acquaintances. Since Halo 3:ODST's multiplayer mode didn't come with a matchmaking system, I used twitter to find some playmates:

I got about six replies, and after suffering through ten minutes of a game with a piss-poor connection, I threw in the towel. Chalk it up as a failure, but ten minutes of gameplay with a shoddy connection was better than what I'd have got without Twitter, and once the number of people around me with Twitter / Xboxes increases, so will my chances of finding a suitable match. [Sure, I could have gone to a gaming forum, but that'd require registration and hassle!]

Tapping into your social brain

I didn't do so well with maths in school, and even though I can manage numbers in my head fine, I'm functionally retarded when it comes to theorems and formulas and whatnot. So last week, when I needed a smart person to help with a matter at work, I asked Twitter, knowing that my intelligent friends would be able to steer me right.

The problem arose from a missing invoice - €827.50 was paid for X amount of goods @ €6.50, and Y amount at €4.50, how could I figure it out how much of X and Y were needed?

I got 5 responses - 1 from a non-follower who was interested in the hashtag. Each reply told me that my equation made no sense, and didn't help my problem all that much, but it gave me hope for any future legitimate mathematical quandaries I may find myself in (perhaps once I bone up on my maths language).

Reading the [potential] customer's mind

After bemoaning how Floola turned 14.3GB of my iPod's HDD space from 'Music' to 'Other' on Twitter one evening, I got a response from CopyTrans, shilling their alternative software:

Useful? Potentially - I didn't bother to click the link they sent, but being able to see what internet users are saying about yours and your competitor's products online is a boon for any business.

Appreciating those stalwart bloggers

Okay, indulge me on this one - after noticing an additional flurry of hits on my blog from strange places, I saw that it was because @NiallOK took a shine to my post about Matthew McConaughey's campaign to lean against every woman in Hollywood and shared it on Twitter:

I got quite a kick out of seeing this, which was amplified by seeing the people who were kind enough to propagate it. As a blogger, this kind of genuine reaction to a blog entry shows me that shorter blog entries that can be appreciated by more people with less investment will get shared, but five-thousand-word, self-indulgent, esoteric rants about how stupid the word 'sweater' is just turn people off coming back... But where's the fun in that?

Tomorrow, as an early Christmas present to my regular readers, I'll post part one of my 4,000 word treatise on the absurdity of manners! [I kid!]

Nomination for Blog Entry of the Year 2009

1. Watch this trailer for a horrible, horrible film.



2. See what Fin has to say on the matter.

Commenter Beware

Called it!

Another sceptic succumbs to religious rhetoric

It's going to be a slow blogging week, as my noble MacBook is enjoying some spa treatment in Dublin, and my mostly-imaginary girlfriend has suddenly materialised herself in physical form and demanding my attention (as far as figments of my imagination go, she's pretty convincing).

Anyhow, to give you an idea of the kind of effort that will be going into this blog until these two abberations have been corrected, I present some copy and pasting:

To: Sully
From: Jay-Jigga
Subject: Incoming Spam

I was in my gran aunt's house the other day. The room was covered in religious paraphernalia - Jesus, teh vurgin Mary, Padre Pio, crosses. She says "I have a book you might want to read". With a kind of sagacious, knowing look, she hands me "Gangster's Guide to God" - how some ex-thug / wannabe-gangster found God and now preaches the message of Jesus to youths. (She hates that we're all atheists, cuz we're gonna burn for eternity, plus there'll be noone to pray over her grave.)

I was bored, trapped amongst relatives, so I read the first chapter.

Wow. I'm a fuckin believer now, dawg. Seriously.

The thug was feeling very low, after he had almost killed some guy by punching him in the face with a knuckle duster, so he cried out "what has i dones! I am teh sinner!" and a presence from above permeated him and told him "you is teh sinner. Change ur ways r u will goes to hell" and at that moment he "knew - not believed - knew" there was a god. And then, sitting behind his typewriter, the author of this magnificent book went for the kill, with words of paradigm-exploding subtle wisdom and intricate philosophical profundity: just because you say “God is a fairytale”, it doesn’t mean he is, in the same way that me saying “you, Sully, are a fairytale” doesn’t mean you don’t exist.

Saaavee me Jebus!

The Stars

Some weeks ago, after stepping out of a taxi on a typically frosty night, I noticed that the stars in the night sky were particularly visible. Since getting inside the warm house seemed a far more pressing need, I only took a quick glance as I darted for the door. I then stood on the front step waiting for Fin to unlock the door for far longer than I ought to have, given the frigid conditions.

Somewhat agitated, I spun around to see Fin, utterly motionless, mouth agape, as he stared up at the celestial bodies. I prompted him to get his ass in gear and let me inside, and after a brief pause, he responded by slowly and deliberately lifting his right arm, then outstretching his index finger towards the heavens.

“But... Ursa Major” he whined, still transfixed by the display.

Envious of his rather efficient beer-coat, and intrigued to experience stargazing with someone who at least sounds convincingly educated on the subject, I strolled away from my stoop, sidled up behind him, and aligned my eyes with his quavering finger, which had now hung suspended for at least half a minute.

Once my field of view no longer included the porch lights, street lamps and such, the universe suddenly snapped into focus, revealing thousands of twinkling lights, each vying for my attention, and I felt a sudden pang of shame for not truly appreciating them before.

As soon as I was in position behind him, Fin traced a line from point to point on the brightest stars, and again muttered those magical four syllables: “Ursa Major”, then drunkenly wandered towards the house.

I stood there in the yard for another few moments, staring up at the impossible immensity of what lay before me, feeling entirely inferior about my ignorance about what I was witnessing, yet elated by the childish awareness that I was looking billions of years into the past, able to contemplate the sheer insignificance of myself and yourself and ourselves on this incredible planet.

As I looked as far as I could into the deepest blacks of space, now blissfully unperturbed by the Arctic conditions, I came to a realisation. Whilst I once scoffed at his rather poorly-contextualised and ham-fistedly expressed effusion, I can proudly stand by Fin and admit what should be true of any man, woman or child with a sense of wonder:

“The stars, I love them”

Heil Herr Finlay!

Here's a disturbing one for you, kids.

It seems that Fin, He of fin.ie fame, is using His totalitarian rule of Fin Blog to quash any dissenting views, brutally silencing any comments that aimed only to inform and educate, without a word of acknowledgement.

Dear readers, know that Finlay's seeming infallibility is merely the result of having the power to annul the words of dissenters from the very annals of history! Just last week, my illuminating remarks spent a period of three days in purgatory, before being cast to the deep dank dungeon of cyberspace, never to surface again.

I hope that Finlay will see the light, and instead of continuing to use subterfuge in fixing grammatical faux-pas and any commentary of their past existence, he embraces a more laissez-faire style of blog comment.

Dear reader, I am counting on you to show Finlay how much fun an unfettered comments section can be. That is why I sincerely ask that you take a moment to leave a comment, and say the most reprehensible thing about me (and my blog, if you can manage) that comes to mind.

I'm counting on you.



We're counting on you.

Pourin' out a li'l liquor...

You think blogging is easy? You think I should ask more of myself than five posts a month? You've probably not tried it for yourself - unless you're going to throw up absolutely every random thing you do over the course of a day, or you've found yourself a rich area to specialise in, it's difficult to find the time, or the right topic to post about (I try to keep this blog general for people who don't know me but enjoy random nonsense, only occasionally indulging overly-personal posts - let me know if I'm succeeding on that by the by).

If you don't believe me, let's take a look at the list of dead blogs started by those within my various spheres of influence. The common thread linking them all? They all came up with better titles than mine.

Diarmuidos
Born: 19th January 2008 Died: 25th April 2008 Posts: 20

A blog started by my older brother to serve the internet with download recommendations while also offering a platform for him to discuss his various programming endeavours in college. He probably got distracted by finishing up his final year projects. And organising his wedding. And having a wife and stuff.

Notable post: Probably his first, in which he proudly announced that he had officially become a 'blogster'. Bless his little heart, he tried.

Ireland's Eoghan
Born: 5th November 2007 Died: 8th December 2008 Posts: 16 (Might be a bit premature to declare this one deceased - he Lazarused on us before after 4 months of lying cold)

After taking umbrage to a remark I made on this blog in reference to some Gott-lieben graffiti, my recently-acquired friend from college took to the internet to grant his riposte a bit more gravitas. After getting that off his chest he set about chiding people who deposit bodily effluvia in his bed without his consent. It's possible that the sudden drying up of such incidents is what caused the fatal posting-drought. It's possible that this post will temporarily alleviate that, with a post entitled "News of my blog's death has been greatly exaggerated"

Notable post: Off the top of my head, the most enjoyable post to come to mind is his reaction to the Transformers film, featuring a try-not-to-spit on your monitor surprise ending (sorta).

Ocean of Noise
Born: 15th September 2008 Died: 15th September 2008 Posts: 1

A stillborn. After a triumphant 'hello world!', and the tease of "New Mixes coming", DJ Rob dropped off the radar.

Notable post: The comments for his first entry. After some slight goading for the radio silence by yours truly, Rob replied explaining that "the day I went to record the first mix the fucking power supply on my desktop blew up and I can't afford a new one at the moment :-(." At least there's hope for the future. Once Rob unbrokes himself, of course.

Gather Around Children... It's Storytime
Born: 7th September 2007 Died: 10th December 2007 Posts: 10

As part of a class requirement for a media module she was taking, my favourite Pittsburgh-resident with the initials CK posted ten entries up over the course of a semester. Despite my repeated urges to keep up the good blogging, she hit her minimum requirement and quit posting, teaching me that the promise of a link from my blog isn't as effective a motivational ploy as I believed it to be. The blog itself is a delight to read, as Cait has a way of packaging the banal in a riveting fashion.

Notable post: Christ. Where to begin? There's the time she accidentally tried to smuggle a rusty screwdriver onto a plane, as well as the entry in which she somehow makes an irrational panicking fit seem like the only logical course of action. With a gun to my head, I'll have to say my favourite was the time she embarrassed herself in front of a pro footballer in a spectacular fashion - even when rereading it just now I had a chuckle.


In case you didn't notice, I'm particularly disappointed about the demise of 'Gather Around Children... It's Story Time' - I tried to convince Cait to keep it going, but once the class ended, so did the willingness to blog. Rather than admit to myself that I'm utterly ineffectual, I've convinced myself that it was the url that killed the site. Think about it for a second - can you imagine trying to tell people the address for your blog? "It's doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot gather around children it's story time dot blogspot dot com." Or how about typing that addressbarfull every time you wanted to visit the site? It can't be done in one sitting - I've tried. One way or another, the unwiedily named blog is no more, and the blogosphere is poorer as a result.

But hang on a tick - Cait's just after getting back on the blogging horse! As if to commemorate the one year death anniversary of her first effort, Cait has ventured into this digital graveyard of blogging talent and planted a poorly-conceptualised-metaphor of a rose to keep us optimistic despite the bleakness of the present.

While I do indeed begrudge her foresight in coming up with a clever name (albeit one based borrowed from another author) and her disciplined prolific posting schedule, it is my pleasure to be able to recommend Cait's newest blogging endeavour, Thoughts are King, which will now be added to my meagre Links panel as the old ones are retired.

Just give me a while with the old ones, okay? It'll take a while to let them go...

A sceptic's atonement

A label I have no objections to being slapped with is that of 'sceptic'. To be sceptical of outlandish claims is a trait that no person could ever be ashamed of, and more sceptics are needed in society to act as firewalls for bad information. The following story is about my spectacular failure to provide this service.

Last month sometime, after a trip to the cinema, I was in the car with Mega. We were having another one of those incredible exchanges of intellect, speaking on a level few people can manage:

Mega, how come Vin Diesel hasn't been in any films lately?

It's cos he's gay.

Really? I never heard that.

Oh yeah - big scandal. All over the papers.

Wow. I completely missed that. Is it true?

Yup - the newspapers were going to break the story, so he beat them to it and came out of the closet.

Makes sense, I suppose. Amazed I never heard of it.

A few days later, I'm at my father's house. XXX is on the TV, its cacophony of screaming and explosions providing my father with the kind of ambience he needs to enjoy his Sunday paper.

Watching XXX eh?

He doesn't look up from his paper as he mutters his response.

Yup.

To jump-start the conversation I throw out an interesting nugget of information:

Y'know one of the stuntmen died during the making of this film?

The paper drops below his eye line. He peers at his grotesquely over sized TV unblinkingly as the protagonist rides a scrambler around the most explosive compound ever captured on film, performing any number of daring manoeuvres that could conceivably end a man's life.

Of course - they never said which scene it was that killed him.

My words break the spell and he glances at me.

That's amazing all the same. I can see how somebody'd get hurt. Where'd you hear that?

I watched the director's commentary on DVD a few years back.

He nods silently. Then turns back to his paper. The conversation is drying up, so I scan for any more interesting tidbits relating to the film. After mulling it over for a half-second, I decide to proceed:

Here's something else you don't know. Y'know Vin Diesel?

Yer man there with the baldy head, yeah?

Yeah.

What about him?

Y'know how he hasn't been in any films lately?

I hadn't noticed, but why hasn't he been in any films?

Because he's a homosexual.

Silence. My father looks at me in disbelief. It could have something to do with my odd word-choice. I blurt out what little details I have:

He was outed as being gay a few years ago and hasn't been able to get work since - noone takes him seriously anymore.

Vin Diesel drives his bike through a group of AK-47 toting henchmen who fall like a set of skittles, spraying bullets as they do.

Y'mean he's a queer?

A helicopter rolls into the shot. I'm already shaking my head at my father, regretting my decision to set him off.

I can see why nobody would take him seriously, so.

Vin Diesel looks around the compound, looking for an escape route as the helicopter's minigun whirrs up.

The guy who has been driving around breaking necks is actually a hairdresser?

Vin Diesel charges forward on his bike, hitting a conveniently placed ramp that launches him onto a slanted corrugated rooftop that he uses to jump onto the next, the action tracked by chronic-Parkinson's-afflicted cameramen.

My father was beginning to splutter through his self-congratulatory chuckles

You mean to tell me that this super-duper-secret-agent would be an airhostess if he wasn't killing for a living?

A series of great big bassy booms accompany the barn's explosion, as a mess of debris and glowing orange flames thunder towards our hero, eventually engulfing him. A split second later, he triumphantly emerges from the blaze, seemingly unperturbed by the amount of death he had to defy at once. And yet:

I don't know if I'll ever be able to look at him the same again. I wish you hadn't told me that!

I knew that my father's exaggerated display of homophobia was just him joking around, but his closing remarks made me lament the fact that I had passed on information I didn't verify for myself.

The following morning I decided to use the Internet to verify Vin Diesel's sexuality:


'Vin Diesel Slams Gay Rumours'. 19 keystrokes was all it took to rubbish Mega's story of a decloseted action star, yet by the time I looked it up, the damage had been done.

Next time I met with my father, I came clean and admitted that I had passed on bad info. He looked at me funny. Seems he "didn't give a flying fuck anyhow". My sleeping pattern returned to normal.

That's the thing about being a sceptic: there's always a logical explanation - it might just be a bit of research away. The question still stood though. Why hadn't I seen much of Vin Diesel in a whiel? Was his credibility hurt in some way? Didn't take long to figure this one out.

In touch with my base...

(This is what the Internets would call an epic win)

With friends like these...

A few months ago, I decided to add the Feedjit widget to the blog, which sits to the right side of the page and displays where the last few hits came from, for all that are interested (such as myself).

Late last night, I got a message from friend and fellow-blogger Fin, suggesting I have a gander at the detailed results page for the widget.

From the details above, it seems that someone came to the site from Ireland, using Firefox as their browser, running Mac OS X, and found it through google after searching for 'people who are shit at halo'.

After a bit more scrolling, I saw a few more unusual entries of dubious veracity:

As you've probably surmised by now, my friend is an idiot. A very clever idiot. If you're interested, he's written up the same tale with a bit more technical information, on his new look blog! (Oooooh!)

Excuses Excuses...

It seems every other month I find myself apologising for some perceived infraction of the blogger - blog-reader covenant. Dear reader, I am truly sorry that I only managed a feeble three posts during the month of August, and I'll try my best to counterbalance this dearth during the month of September.

In the meantime, I humbly present my excuse:

I couldn't update because I had a few things to do. Things like:

Going to Pittsburgh to see old friends!

Going to a wedding in Wisconsin!
Checking out a baseball game in Milwaukee!

Being best man at my brother's wedding in Cork!

Visiting Northern Ireland!
Graduating!
Going to my graduation ball!

Next post should be business as usual: over-zealous effusions about things people care little about!

The View from C5

A quickie for ya; this is what I'm can see from my room at the moment.




This snow and blistering cold is actually quite useful because I'm nearing my 30th consecutive hour of being awake; since I sacrificed my sleep last night to hit my deadlines today, the perma-erect nipples are the only thing keeping me sharp. My busy day went quite well, despite my lack of slumber. Started off with me making a presentation to my Rhetoric class on a Catholic mass. It was supposed to be a 'cultural breakdown,' but since I winged it and was deulsionally tired, it turned into a ten minute lecture on why everybody should be agnostic. I won't indulge myself with much hyperbole and poetic license (because my buddy Krampe was there, and I know she reads this!), but I will note that for every ten Relgiously conservative types I successfully pissed off, I got a glimmer of admiration from the two people in the class who could kinda, sorta, just maybe understand where I was coming from, which kinda made it worthwhile, I guess!

Next I had my last Audio/Radio class, where we recorded postulation on Global Warming for our Prof's radio show (I honestly have little recollection of this; it's likely I fell asleep while reading), and then I took a Psychology exam! Could be the delusion speaking, but I think I did pretty well... I'll keep you posted!

My plans for the rest of the day involve taking it seriously easy; I'm going to sleep for at least two hours, then eat, then vegetate for a few more hours until I can sleep again... At the moment, I feel as though I could last the rest of the day on the sheer amount of caffeine I consumed today as it is, but I feel a headache setting in, so I should nip it in the bud...

Just because I think it's funny (and maybe a little creepy), this is what the view from inside C5 was yesterday evening;