I am so happy, first tree in our own place, and indeed in any place I have lived in, to the best of my recollection.

I also cleaned my Google analytics account up. One of the problems I never managed to fix on the previous versions of WordPress was the format of the URL to each post. Previously I only was able to set the post to something like www.y2kprawn.ie/postid=1234567 not www.y2kprawn.ie/datetime/postname Now I am able to use proper URL’s so I let a new Analytics account re-look at the pages and take the counts afresh.

One odd thing about the new template though is the Windows live writer treatment of the theme download. The preview looks nothing like the post and now it looks pretty sickly and hard to use when I am posting, so thoughts from the crew or the internet peeps would be most welcome.

Close up here

I changed the windows regional setting’s to better show this.

Thanks to @komplett.ie for pointing this out.

First, the place, I paid 20 Euro for the VIP section of Dundrum Cinema. For the extra money I got a bigger chair miles away from the screen, but high enough that no ones head got in my way. I don’t thing the overall experience was that good. I found the staff at the “bar” a bit unpleasant, and the section itself was nothing special, just a bit of spare space they could not figure out what to do with. I had a glass of wine.

Halfway through the film I was wishing for the whole bottle. This is an awful film. it could not be any worse. It was directed by someone who cant even be bothered get a full name. At the intro credits, or whatever you call them they had to show the name of the film twice, just in case I had paid for the wrong ticket. The cyborg dude was the only good actor, barely. Every one in the film delivered the cornball dialogue as if they were reading from a teleprompter and could not wait to get to the bar, or their bed, or back to the batcave. If they cant be bothered act then you cannot be bothered watch. The terminators were the same recycled unconvincing models from the other films. No new additions apart from the ones you see in the trailer. If you have seen the trailer you have seen the whole film really. I personally could not have given 2 shites about the ending, boring , predictable. There is no emotional development of the characters, even in a usual cornball American movie sacrifice scene there was a sense of “whatever, die already so I can continue delivering bad dialogue”.

Robots are cool,but the only cool thing about this film was the trailer I saw for Transformers before it.

SkyNet is nothing more than a stupid advanced toaster and the humans are a whiny bunch of generic angst ridden stereotype 101’s. If the machine was so smart then it would have just nuked the whole planet totally. And then done it again every so often. Not this elaborate crap of fate and cyborgs and things. There is more radiation in this film than you could shake a uranium stick at and it seem radiation poisoning is a thing of the past. Sure, all this would never have made a good film but then again taking that attitude with story would have prevented this piece of shit from ever being made.

By the way, cinemas, I do not like sitting through 20 mins of ads that are on TV. I don’t watch much TV for the same reason. I paid for my ticket. Show me film trailers , entertainment, I paid already to get in the last time I checked , so you can shove your ad’s. I think people should start to go looking for a manager when crap like this happens. I did before a few years back in Galway and got a really snotty retort from some little jacked up shit. I think we should do it en masse.

Please , giant robots smashing stuff, that all I want from Transformers. Roll on release.

Knowing Windows 7 has a great desktop wallpaper feature where you can have a stack of wallpaper and change them at will I set off downloading them to my machine.

Then right Click on your desktop and select Personalise.

Open the pictures folder and the Personalisation tab side by side

Now, right click any picture and select “Set as desktop background”.

A new “Unsaved theme” will appear.

Select the “Desktop background” option highlighted here in red.

Windows 7 at this point, having a complete degree from the University of Smartarse, will have the folder open where you originally selected the first image.

Select the pictures you want in the slideshow , choose Fill as the Picture position and pick a time you want the pictures to change. i have highlighted the sections below.

You can also drag other files from other folders in there as well, drag and drop applies.

Click “Save changes”.

A new theme will appear, right click on it and pick the option you want.

Save the theme for yourself, or make a theme out of pic’s of embarrassing nights out and send it to your friends.

Here is the theme I created.

Here is what my desktop looks like

high res version

And so , myself and a colleague pre-ambled to the World of PC’s, and lo and behold I was greeted with the usual laziness and incompetence I am accustomed to in what can be best described as a public purchaseorium. Or a flea market, I don’t know which is a more apt description.

After looking at a list of well priced, but terrible lacklustre machines I settled on a Dell, very nice machine , with the specs to match the needs of the buyer. My Colleague then had to actually go and find a sales rep. In an empty store. At 11:00 in the morning. When the rep, who looked terribly inconvenienced at the fact that we might want to actually want to buy something arrived, he then proceeded to read the label and price tag to us. The laptop was rated at “up to 2 hours battery life” , when I asked what size battery was in it , he said “2 hours”. “Sorry” , I said, I mean how many cells in the battery. “9”, he exclaimed.

I then proceeded to explain to him that I had a HP with a  4 cell battery which I upgraded to a 8 cell and a netbook with a 3 cell that I upgraded to 6 in order to get over the battery life problem, and that, indeed if there was a 9 cell battery in this machine, which I doubted there was as it was an extra on the same dell ordered from the internet , that the battery life should be in the order of 5 hours for the same spec machine. I then asked was he sure that it was a 9 cell battery. He then picked up the machine, turned it over to peek into the empty battery bay and proceeded to count the pins on the connector.

Yep, you heard me right, the sign of a fuckin bluffer if I ever seen one. A person who would lie through his teeth and tell the customer it was a HD ready home entertainment device with XBOX integration if it would get the sale, and then deny he said it on returns. A complete shit eating bollix. Apathy as well is another way of extorting the general public.

We then asked him about another model at around the same price and was informed that it was a warehouse thing with no battery or power supply. I mean, WTF ? He even went so far as to say it was ok and an attractive offer.

So I went next door to Currys to see what was there. The same load of machines except each one was mis-labelled , some said XP Home when they were running Vista Premium, some said Vista Premium when they were home , 2GB when they were 1 etc. Some had no specs. A lady apologised as they were under staffed when there was 1 person in the store. I finally got another lad who was a lot more up front and polite, and showed me a few great deals fair play to him, but PC world was still the better price.

Back to PC world, decision made the dell. So yet again , in an empty store , we had to go back to the top, inconvenience a chap in the middle of what looked like a great conversation with a co-worker. He sodded off for a bit trying to find a box after the statement “I will see if it is in stock” , like there was a ROARING TRADE going on this morning. And finally got back with a box. He then took my details and forgot to add in the half price internet security as we discovered at the checkout, and the checkout girl had to go sort it out. 

So times are hard eh, people need jobs, well I know secondary school students that could do this job better. No wonder the general non tech public fear computers, when the computer stores are staffed by the Muppet show. How can anyone in these places see themselves as trusted advisors on technology to the general public. Another few years ago in PC World in Galway I watched sales man selling a Celeron laptop with integrated graphics as a platform you can play F.E.A.R on , a state of the art game at the time, as he wandered of for the price list I explained exactly was was happening to her, showed her the model that could and watched her leave the store. Got some dirty look off that prick that day I can tell you.

I cant sell a bathroom, or a car, not unless I was qualified, I would feel like a complete c**t if I was doing that with no understanding of what the customer wants. I do technology stuff, and I ask friends to come to me before going into a technology shop here, I have helped people out of bad experiences over the years that technology experts in stores only exacerbated. I don’t sell , I deal in zeroes and ones, and let other people fill in the rest of the numbers.

Oh well, got my laptop, anyone else have a funny experience , or should be band together to form an advisory group to make sure that stores are staffed with courteous and knowledgeable people ?