It's ok, I live

Apologies for falling off the face of the earth just there. For the last two weekends I've had people over, and so haven't had time to blog. Work has been getting busier simultaneously (I'm trying to teach all the toys to play nicely with each other), and anyway, I always feel guilty about blogging at work (even if I recognise it as part of my "background process cycle"* )

Anyways, last weekend Aoife became my first guest. All other prospective visitors would do well to note that Aoife has defined the standard gift pack. I was so impressed I took a photo, but then I lost it. I'll just have to paint it with words: laid out on my bed, on top of a chopping board (which was a gift, but I will exlude from the standard gift pack definition, on the grounds that there are only so many chopping-boards a man needs) are Lyons tea bags, Jacobs biscuits, Cadburys chocolate, Kilmeaden cheese (ooooh! Cheddar!), Flahavan oats, a brac (with a ring. I know this for sure, I found it in my mouth), and something else, I'm certain, but I can't remember... Oh yeah, Tayto!

This weekend, Paul (my younger brother) became the Buzz Aldrin of Helsinki visits. He also came literally laden with goodies - about a kilogram of cadburys, Tayto, a random selection of my cds, and best of all, my courtesy-of-Ryanic Acquisition Services surround sound speaker system! W00T! This got fully tested with lots and lots of family guy episodes :)

I'd give a full account of our exploits for both weekends, but I'm afraid that future visitors will twig that I've a set list of activities about half way through their tours, become disgusted by my lack of originality and spontaneity, and kill me with a serendipitously discarded hatchet, between locations, just to spice things up. No really, this is my phobia.

I will say that I had a great time on both weekends :D

To bring things up to date, it's gotten seriously cold here. It was 2 degrees this morning cycling in, and my hands were so cold, that I couldn't operate the lock on my bike for a few minutes. Then they heated up, but too quickly, so they stung like hell. Also, lack of sleep meant I slept in and missed Taekwondo at 11:15, which was irritating.

Why do I lack sleep? you ask. In short, I'm convinced that one of my neighbours is a lunatic. Not in the "jaysus he's a lunatic, would you look at him" generic description befitting Meath GAA players, but a genuine, bedlam candidate. At 5.21am he started shouting, as if he was starting a screaming match with a spouse (a sport in some parts of Helsinki). Thing is, there was no shouting back. This went on sporadically for a while (I can't be more accurate, it was 5am) until, after a lull, he started screaming. As in "aaaaahhhhh.... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" screaming... there was banging in there too... and maybe a door on the corridor opening. Certainly some lights in the building opposite went on, so he was damn loud. This repeated itself at intervals.

Finally, my computer is sick. It is currently about as stable as my neighbour. I suspect I'm unwittingly hosting a rogue html server on it. Among the more unusual symptoms it displays, is a slight lookup error: if I try to go to www.symantec.com, firefox instead opens the page I host from my Apache2 server. Furthermore, I couldn't uninstall Apache. I'm not sure why, the error message was in Finnish, but basically it's ill. So tonight I'm going to format, install win2k, try and fix the RAID Array (which is using only one of the two hard drives I have) and hopefully have time to play the Judge Dread game I bought from someone at work. If I come back ranting about how you're all scum you'll know I was successful :)