One sure fire way of knowing for certain that Summer has arrived, or at least when mother nature thinks it has, is when you see me running down the street with my head darting in all directions and my arms flailing. No, I’m not on fire – I’ve seen a bee. Or a wasp. Or pretty much anything that can fly and sting me! I can’t fly, or sting people for that matter and that’s why bees – but especially wasps – terrify me to the point that I’m comfortable running down the street looking like a mental home escapee.

It all started when I was 5. I had used all my smarts that I’d developed at the time to craftily trap a wasp behind some curtains. I was still at the age (or at least at the mental age) where you find the sound of bugs being squashed to be hugely entertaining, so I wasn’t going to pass up this opportunity. I didn’t know it at the time, but the wasp had material science on its side and my planned attack had an Achilles heel that would scar me for life!

I carefully lined up the wasp with my thumb and bit down on my tongue to improve my concentration and ensure I wouldn’t miss and give my prey the opportunity to flee… or attack and kill me. Just at the right moment, I pounced.

I’ll never forget the pain.

It was as if my thumb was being dropped in and out of a bed of nettles whilst simultaneously being hit with a hammer! As I mentioned though, my plan was doomed to failure. The curtains were net curtains which are about as thick as a single sheet of rationed World War II toilet paper and as I found out on that fateful day, are no good at stopping small needles with sacs of venom from finding their way through and into my beloved thumb!

The sting only took a few days to clear up but from that moment on I felt as if every wasp I saw was planning on avenging their distant cousins death. I wasn’t so scared of bees though and I think it’s easy to explain why when I compare the two creatures to minority groups. The bees are the Jews – hard working and if they’re targeted for something they generally don’t retaliate and move out to some desert somewhere and at worst whimper about being a cursed, persecuted race or some nonsense like that. The wasps on the other hand are the Italian-Americans – feisty and aggressive and if you hurt one of them you can be sure that his family and friends will be after you like flies on shit and sooner or later you’ll find yourself tied up in the back of a car that belongs to someone called Antonio who happens to be involved in “Waste Disposal”. In other words, you don’t fuck with wasps… or Italians!

I haven’t been stung by a wasp since. Once bitten, twice shy and all that jazz. The fear is still omni-present though and once a wasp gets into my “personal space”, I freak out and bolt down the road. If a wasp gets in my face, I see no possible way of getting it to fuck off without being reminded of the nettle-hammer combo all those years a go!

So while many people are donning shorts in this spell of good weather, I’m holed up, praying for rain, sleet and snow so all those flying, venomous freaks will freeze and starve. Maybe then I can actually enjoy a Summer for once without spending it running through streets!

I admit that I don’t exactly have the best track record with my phones. Well, up until last month I’d been using the same phone for the past 2 years until I managed to break 3 phones in as many weeks and amazingly only one of which happened when drunk! On paper it would seem as if we could write down a very simple equation: “iphone + adam = recipe for disaster” but even with that very likely possibility in mind, the iPhone has sliding menus. It’s pretty much calling out my name!!! I do want to make a somewhat educated purchase though so I’ve decided to do some research online because the last time I went to do find out more about something from a sales rep, I came away with a membership to a gym!

On the iPhone page on O2.ie, they describe and give an outline of what they call the “O2 Experience Plus” tariff.

Regarding data, they say that it’s 99c per day for data usage (1c per KB up to a max charge of 99c). If I so much as breathe on the 3G network, I’ll be pretty much up to the maximum charge. Do O2 offer any data plans similar to Three’s offering? The apparent “stealth” charge of €30 a month doesn’t really appeal to me.

In the way of texts, the tariff boasts free texts and calls to the O2 Network if I top up by €20 per month. The only problem there is that myself and everyone else I knew on O2 jumped off that ship years a go when the other operators introduced great offers while O2 continued to do nothing but screw us as if we were 12 year old virgins. So this tariff is pretty much useless to me given it’s 13c to send texts to other networks and I’m pretty sure that’s more expensive than it was to send texts back when I was on this sorry excuse for a network a whole two years a go and it’s also 5 times dearer than what I’m currently paying!

Now if I navigate outside of the iPhone subsection of the O2 site, I can see information about the O2 Experience More plan which offers Free texts to all Irish networks if I top up by €20 or more per month. Now they mention nothing about this tariff on the iPhone subsection, is this because it isn’t available for iPhone customers or because they don’t really want to us advertise this superior tariff to us gullible and naive interested buyers? Or perhaps the folks at O2 don’t know their arse from their elbow when it comes to designing informative and usable websites?

They also mention nothing about Text Bundles in the iPhone subsection. I’d hope they’re available but working on the assumption that they aren’t and based off a realistic guess that I’d send 600 texts a month, I’d be liable to spend €78 on texts alone every month. I’ll take a conservative approach with phone calls and say that I’d spend 3 minutes talking every day which adds up to €27 a month. This is all on top of the €30 I’d be charged for data usage and all of a sudden I see I’m paying €135 a month which is over 4 times what I’m currently paying on Three with my INQ1.

If I include the cost of buying the phone itself, it works out as costing €2190 over a twelve month period to use the phone without restricting myself. Yet despite this ****ing astronomical cost, the iPhone’s beautiful interface and massive array of apps still appeal to me but then again I just can’t get that 4 figure cost out of my head and it’s there that this entire journey grinds to a halt.

I’m a student and simply can’t justify spending that much money in a year on anything other than alcohol. Am I a mile off with my estimates or am I on the right track? Does Bill Pay offer any notable benefits over Speakeasy other than the lower cost of the phone? Finally, given that I’m currently on Three, is there any possibility of unlocking an iPhone and being able to use it on Three without features being crippled?

F’kin iPhone!

There. I’ve said it. Yesterday I went out to the Grand Hotel in Tramore to play the Pro Nutz €120 game. I’ll confess right now that €100 is up there with the most I’ve ever paid into a poker tournament and it really didn’t help that I was still fighting what seemed to be a losing battle against the latest cold that my lovely American guests decided to pass on to me in work! From the moment I sat down at the table, I just felt like spewing away my chips and heading back into Waterford so I could partake in Jamie’s birthday celebrations – Part Deux.

Did I really want to go out though? I mean I had just handed over two weeks rent to play a poker tournament – a feat that some would already describe as borderline insane – and I also felt like a lukewarm Death sitting at the table so it pained me (even more) to think about how I’d feel if I was making shapes on the dance floor. I still had a gigantic hickey on my neck which I wasn’t all to pushed about displaying for all to see and even at the poker tables, despite my best efforts to cover it up, the players were asking did I get hit by a sliotar in the neck. How I wondered if anyone would have believed me earlier on in the week if I had told them that rather than the by now tired excuse of an allergic reaction to aftershave. Anyway, I’m kind of going off on a tangent. This post is about the homosexuality of poker and that’s what I intend on talking about!

The tournament itself got off to a duck arse start. We got a 20k starting stack and 30 minute blinds with all the levels included which meant that nobody was in any rush to go anywhere. I lost 2k at my first table when I missed a few combo draws but changed gears on my next table to build up to close to 30k. This was without getting any massive hands but I was able to value bet effectively and managed to induce the odd bluff here and there. My first big hand of note came when I had just been moved back to my initial table after a few levels. We had just sat down after a break and the table was half empty. I called a raise with A8 and flopped two pair. I called a bet on the flop and raised the turn and river with the river falling another ace, giving me a house. I seemed to have a very rocky image at this table which was proven when I had someone fold Kings to me preflop for the very first time ever! Half of me is still in disbelief that someone could possibly fold Kings preflop but when Dave Tutty raised to 1600 and had another player push in for 4.8, I grabbed my bundle of green 5k chips and reraised to 24k. Dave thought about it for seemingly an age before folding what I assumed to be something like TT or JJ. The guy who pushed had been tilting with a bag of spanners, all I remember is that I hit my set on the flop and he was drawing dead by the turn! Even just thinking back on this hand has me shaking my head in either disgust or disappointment – I can’t quite figure out which and at whom it’s directed! Maybe Dave can shed some light on this sometime?

I continued to accumulate over the next two hours until I lost half my stack by calling a river bet on a straightened board in the hope of chopping it only to be shown a gutshot that had got there. Suddenly I was below average and the possibility of going out in Waterford was once again reignited. I really did feel like shit though. I was shivering like mad in a room that everyone else was complaining was a sweat box and my eyes felt like needles were being probed into them when I looked at anything that resembled light. Even in my lethargic, nigh-on comatosed state, it didn’t take me long to surmise that strobe lights and pints wouldn’t be the solution to all of my problems. Although in saying that, it hasn’t stopped me in the past! I realised that even if I did get knocked out and got the last bus into town, I’d probably just collapse onto a bed, sofa or any surface that could possibly support my weight and not stir for a good twelve hours. So, given that I had now got it into my head that I wasn’t going to be able to make it to the Forum, I decided to dig deep and try bring what little A-game I have to the table.

I went relatively card dead for a while, and managed to keep my head afloat by raising anything remotely connected from late position as I tried to use my tight image to pilfer the blinds. It was working quite well until Colm Reville was moved into my buttons big blind. His blind is stubborn enough to attack on a normal day but it gets even trickier when there’s 20 pints thrown into the mix and when he has the perfect reshove stack of 15BB’s. So I practically postponed the pillaging of the blinds exclusively from late position and started stealing from other areas of the table, targeting some of the other tighter blinds sitting at the table. A big hand for me came when I found QQ under the gun and raised it up to 3.5 times the big blind only to have Ray Kent reshove from late position for what was about 15BB’s. I made the call and he had JJ which didn’t improve meaning I was now up to 97k, just above average!

Not long later, Billy Fitz opened in early position to 14k and I found AK and reraised to 40k. Action went back to him and he shoved for not a whole lot more. Even if he had enough to make an effective 4bet shove, I’m always snap calling Billy in this spot as I’m always a run and jump ahead of his range. He had A8, which (I hope) is the very lower part of his range here. My AK held and I was now one of the chipleaders as we approached the bubble for the final table. The Fox really came into his own here and subtly played up this fact. He was hovering below average himself but urged everyone not to go crazy on the bubble – while stealing left, right and centre of course . He was directly to my right so I was really losing out as he was always getting into the pots first and my small blind also found its way over to him on a few occasions. I did manage to get most of them back though when I got two streets of value from second pair against him.

Fast forward 15 minutes and we were on the final table with 5 players going to get paid. I was third in chips. We lose a player on the very first hand with blind on blind action. AQ for the small blind and AA the big blind who was about to become a monstrous chipleader. I steal a few hands with Ace-rag before picking up AK and having a shortstacked big blind shove over my raise. I call and am racing against 22 but I never get off the line as the flop falls 2-3-3. I build my stack up once again over the next hour as the entire table seems to have died until my good mate Ollie St John limps his button, even though he’s shortstacked. The small blind, who’d been playing very well, decides to pounce on this and shoves. I’m lucky enough to look down at KK and snap it. Ollie passes Ace-8 face up and the small blind sheepishly turns over T-4o. It’s all about timing in this game and he was just extremely unlucky to run into the card rack that I was becoming! I hold and knock him out.

Play continues at a snails pace until I pick up QQ in mid position and make my standard raise which is just under 3 times the big blind. The Big Blind is the same player who shoved with the deuces earlier and he once again shoves. He’s even shorter than the last time we tangled after losing a big pot a few hands earlier and his shove doesn’t even cover my raise! He has A4 and once again my big hands hold. We’re now down to 7 players and I have around 200k. Two hands later and I look down at AA for the first time in the tournament. The chipleader raises from early position to 20k. I reraise to 80k and then the small blind shoves for 128k! I nearly jizzed in my pants Lonely Island style when the chipleader announces that he too is all-in! I fist-pump-jizz call but little do I realise that absolute carnage is lurking around the corner!

So I’m all-in, in a three way pot that makes up over 60% of all the chips in play, with aces! The small blind has JJ, the chipleader has KK. Paul Warren then says that he folded KJ! It’s then that I make the mistake of thinking about the money – €2.2k for the winner, €1500 for second. With 60% of the chips, I could comfortably blind out to second and still ought to be castrated as punishment for not taking it down. I’d been running extremely well all day and apart from the one brainfart where I called off half my stack over three streets in the hope of chopping a pot, I’d also been playing well. I honestly can’t remember the flop. What I will remember though, and I swear I’ll have it with me for life, is the pre-pubescent screeches of delight and the pounding of the table from Vinny as it came down Jack-shit-shit fuckity fuck fuck! FUUUUUUUCCCCCCK!!!! If there was any consolation to be had from this it’s that of the only two fucking outs in the deck, it was the one that didn’t force me to run down Main St and dive off the pier that did indeed fall. So I suppose I can be thankful for that at least. This hand just encapsulated Poker’s homosexuality for me. No game should be allowed to be so gay. It’s just wrong.

I was still left with 120k in chips though and with blinds at 5k/10k, I still had room to play. As a tournament blogger, I witness bad beats for a living so at this stage I just shrug them off and comment on their sickness before getting back to business. I chipped back up to 220k without much difficulty as play had slowed to a complete crawl. It was then that it was suggested that we just break the bubble there and then. There were 7 players left and only 5 due to get paid. We were playing for 10 hours at this stage so we agreed on taking a total of €400 off 1st and 2nd and giving €200 to 6th and 7th. The game was suddenly on steroids and two players were eliminated in quick succession. I then knocked out Ollie in 5th when he shoved from the small blind into my big blind. I saw an Ace which made the call easy and a Ten along with it which made it even easier. Ollie had actually picked up 77 so was unlucky for me to actually have a legitimate hand as I was probably calling there with a whole lot worse. Needless to say I hit my Ace and Ollie exited in 5th.

When we were four handed, Fox was in an ideal position. He had a complete weak-tight nit to his left who was opting to play Mafia Wars on a laptop across the room instead of playing hands and he also had direct position on me and Fox isn’t afraid of the resteal if he smells a rat. Despite Fox being to my direct left or right for the entire tournament, we had avoided a clash thus far. That was until he raised the 5th hand in a row. He raises to 35k under the gun with blinds at 6k/12k and I make it 105k with A7 in the big blind. Fox’s raising range was incredibly wide at this point of the tournament and I hadn’t defended my big blind in a long time. I’m playing a stack of just over 215k so I realise that I’ve committed myself to this pot. And I’m not very happy about it. I also realise that I’m behind in this hand when he starts asking for counts. I try talking Fox out of it saying that I think I’m ahead and point out that I’ve already committed myself to the hand. After thinking for a while he just flat calls. I shove the flop in the dark for a half pot bet and it comes Q58 with a flush draw. He isn’t all that happy but calls with AQ and I fail to improve. I’m not sure if I’m happy with how I played this hand or not. I’m pretty sure he folds out all his better aces on the flop (AT+) and I think I did just enough preflop to make him think I held a pair. I’m not sure if he folds underpairs on the flop though or even if he just flat calls with them preflop. I finish 4th anyway for €520. I tip the €20 and am offered a lift back into town which I jump at.

It’s 3am and I’m hoping that I can meet up with people from The Forum who I assume are meandering back towards town at this time. They’re nowhere to be found though and the forum is deserted with the exception of some poor soul who’s slouched over a railing getting sick all over themselves, something which isn’t all that distant of a memory for me! I make my way back into town and find a few people but the majority are already gone. If only I had a phone that worked. I think I may as well put that €520 into my yearly phone fund just to be safe!

Trips to Cork are always fun. In this case however, calling it fun might be pushing it just a bit! It was Jamie’s birthday so I felt obliged to make the €20 trip down to the Peoples Republic to take part in a special blend of session – Guitar Hero combined with copious amounts of alcohol. I can’t think of a single downside to that type of session which is probably why the more conservative among you think I have a problem!

Guitar Hero makes time fly by and it’s an entertaining side game in itself to see who can reach for their bottle the most times during their brief moments of respite during the RSI-inducing songs while still trying to keep their combo’s going! There were a few close shaves which saw me revisit my toddler years with dribble running down my chin followed by an innocent giggle. Only I assume that those times of bliss all those years a go didn’t involve Miller Genuine Draft. Time flew so quickly that it felt like one minute we were being told that a taxi was going to take 15 minutes to arrive and the next we were being hurried outside to an impatient driver. I was later to discover that this wasn’t actually Guitar Hero warping time and in fact it did only take a minute for the taxi to arrive! This posed quite a few problems for the people still getting ready but more importantly I was left with a full bottle of Buckfast to chug off in record time. It was probably for the best that I didn’t quite finish it!

I had €40 in my wallet and was worried that it might not be enough. I mean in Waterford that gets you into a club, 3 drinks and some food. In Cork though, €40 gets you 13 drinks with some change left over for a Rubber Patty Hamburger at the end of the night. Forgetting about Cork’s drinks offers until the very last minute proved to be a very pleasant surprise at the time but wreaked havoc given my dirty habit of longing to spend every penny in my wallet on a night out!

I would describe the night as being “messy”, a word I’ve noticed myself attach to a lot of nights out as of late, and this is where my blog starts jumping back and forth between the realms of fact and fiction as I struggle to piece together my night after about 1 am. I originally thought that only about 5 minutes of the night were “hazy” but I now realise that I’m being particularly ambitious with the 5 minutes of “haziness” and it’s more like a blank canvas with the occassionally blob of indeterminable paint thrown on every once in a while. Translation: I was absolutely rat-arsed!

I remember buying drinks. I remember dancing. I remember getting my coat. I remember talking about whores to Patrick. I remember buying chicken. I remember trying to eat a chicken wing whole. I remember coughing up chicken bones. I remember getting a taxi. I remember a mug of tea. I remember a burnt hand. Mine .

My phone started going crazy at this stage and I was going crazy too because I can’t answer the thing since I dropped it in a puddle last week. That’s 3 phones in as many weeks for me, but that’s a story for another day! I was no longer with the birthday boy and the group I was out with and instead found myself having my neck attacked. I knew it was going to be bad as my entire left side of my neck felt as if it was set on fire with jet fuel or something. I naturally repaid the favour (although I could have the order of events mixed up there ).

A quick look in the mirror when I woke up those morning confirmed my fears. It’s fucking big! In the past I’ve been able to write them off as being shaving rashes but in this case I’ll probably have to stop short of saying that it’s malaria! Or I could tell work the truth……….

So for the next 4-12 days, I’m a redneck . Great night though!

Last week I absolutely butchered my phone. What started out as a small problem with the slider, ended in lots of bits and pieces after all attempts to fix it had failed quite miserably. Perhaps I subconsciously broke it on purpose because I had been eying up Three’s latest addition to the mobile market, the INQ1, for quite some time.

I was going to write a rather lengthy review of it. But put simply, there’s no need to write a review about a phone which has already picked up numerous awards and won over the hearts and souls of anyone who has been brave enough to take a leap of fate with a companies very first phone to the market! It really is that damn good!

Three have made a big deal out of the Facebook integration. It’s hard to fault it really, as it allows one touch access to all the functions of the fastest growing social network. There is one thing better than “one touch access” though and that’s “no touch access”! And through the INQs handy widget feature, this is possible.

As it stands, there’s no widgets available for download on the INQ. At least not in Ireland anyway. We can add up to 3 RSS feeds to be included on the Home screen though, and this is where we’re given the opportunity to add a Facebook related widget. Facebook might not advertise their RSS feeds very well, but they are there, at least in some sections of their site. By adding them, we can have up to the minute (well, up the hour) updates about our friends statuses and our own notifications. It all sounds good, doesn’t it? Now lets find those feeds.

First we’ll add find the “Notifications” feed. This feed lets you know of any changes to your profile, such as new friend requests, new profile comments and application related messages. To find it, go to the Notifications page. You won’t be able to access it unless you’re logged in, so make sure you are before clicking! Once we’re there, you’ll see a heading in one of the sidebars called “Subscribe to Notifications”. Right click the link that’s directly below this and copy the address and paste it somewhere where you can see it later (a Word or Notepad document for example)

Now we have to find the Status Updates feed. Click on the “Friends” link at the top of the page which will bring you to the Status Updates page. Look for the header “Subscribe” and once again right click the link that’s directly below this and copy the address and paste it to the same place as you did the first feed. You now have everything to need to start feeding this all this data onto your phone.

There are two ways you can proceed from here. You can either follow this guide which will show you how to set up two seperate widgets that will update every hour, or you can be inventive and use what’s known as a feed merging service such as Yahoo! Pipes. The advantage of using a feed mixer is that you’ll only have one feed for all notifications and status updates which will free up space on the screen. The disadvantage is that many of websites that provide these services go down often meaning you’ll be finding yourself constantly looking for alternatives. Yahoo! Pipes is probably the most reliable of them all, but it’s not the most user friendly piece of kit and would take twice the length of this guide to explain properly!

Anyway, we’ll carry on. Assuming you have the addresses of the two feeds pasted into a window somewhere, we can now add the feeds to the phone. Hit the “Menu” button of the phone and scroll to “Feeds”. Hit “options” and select “Add a feed”. In the screen that appears, manually enter in the Feed address, making sure you don’t make any mistakes. Once the feed is added, update it when prompted. Now we’ll set it to update every hour. Go into “Options” once again and select “Auto Update”. Select “Once an Hour” from the options. This ensures that the feed is kept as up to date as possible. To add the other feed, simply repeat the steps of creating a new feed and entering it’s address.

Once both feeds are added, go back into the main menu and select “Tools”. From here we select “manage widgets”. Mark the boxes “RSS Widget 1″ and “RSS Widget 2″ (if you intend on adding both feeds) and hit “Done”. Go back into the Home screen (this is the desktop of the phone) and select the newly added widgets that are prompting you to “Add a Feed”. Select one of the feeds from the list and click done. If you want to add the second feed, simply select the other widget and add the remaining feed to it.

If everything has worked properly, you’ll now find yourself with 2 widgets on the Home screen, both relating to Facebook. One of them lists your friends 10 most recent status changes (eg: Adam is tired), while the other one is solely for notifications (eg: Adam has wrote on your wall). They’ll both be set to update every hour which should be regularly enough to keep you informed of everything Facebook related – unless you’re completely addicted.

If you want a little bit more from them, then I’d recommend you check out Yahoo! Pipes to really have fun with the feeds! If you’re having any problems, leave me a comment and I’ll try help!

Just a little word of warning to finish this piece off. Unless you’re on a Data plan, you’ll probably be charged through the teeth for refreshing these feeds every hour. If ever there was a phone that needed a data package, this is it!

The beginning of my night started in a not so pleasant manner. My appointment with the good old Dr. Jameson lasted longer than I had originally expected. Before I knew it, I had an empty bottle beside me and a phone that was buzzing like it was some kind of sex toy. Not an ideal situation when I was expected to be on my merry way up to the Forum whilst finding myself wearing nothing but a gown and still in dire need of a shower. I anticipated a quick dash into the shower and to be on the road within minutes. That was before I picked up the menthol shampoo!

In the mad rush that I was in, I managed to get the shampoo not only in my hair but also into every part of my eyes! Now had I been using a normal shampoo, it would have hurt somewhat, but when you introduce menthol shampoo into the equation, it changes the situation. To say the least. Menthol shampoo boasts the unique characteristic of leaving this warm and fuzzy feeling wherever it goes. It feels great and it leaves you feeling as if you’re full of energy. Until you get it in the eyes!

One second I was singing along to the brilliant Modest Mouse (I’ve included a song below), the next I was pretty much blind! Talk about being reminded about how fast things can change!! From absolute bliss, to absolute agony. Just like that! My natural reaction was to just turn the shower head towards me. Usually this would be fine, but I just happened to have it on full power and for a brief few seconds I felt as if I was trying to knock my eye socket back in time!

Am I being melodramatic? How about you get some mentol shampoo in your eyes and see how YOU react! “But I’m not that retarded” I hear you say.

True. I’m quite special!

So I pretty much fell for that free gym trial hook, line and sinker. Within 5 minutes of entering the gym, I was in the office handing over my credit card making me possibly the only person in the world who goes in for a free trial and ends up not even getting the free trial but signing a year contract! At least I got a good deal anyway.

I’ve been out of the whole voluntary exercise spiel for quite some time and I knew that I’d take to it like a cat to a freezing pond. I brought my MP3 player with me to help get me through it but I soon learned that the type of music that I walk down the street with isn’t exactly ideal for a stint on the treadmill. I found myself just closing my eyes and running to the beats of the music… and almost being flung off the end of the treadmill. I now understood why gyms always play an endless bombardment of “UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ” over the stereo systems – insurance reasons. People would be flying off treadmills left, right and centre should they dare to play anything decent!

This poses a problem for me as I go to the gym to exercise and not to have blood slowly trickle from my ears thanks to being exposed to such drivel. So I’m on the look out for an alternative work out playlist which would ideally encompass some rock and electro and result in me not having to worry about being flung across the room. A quick Google revealed a few suggested playlists but they didn’t really appeal to me so I went trawling through my music collection to see if I could find anything that would be of interest.

A few months a go, I started to hear good things about an artist going by the name of “Girl Talk” whose made a name for himself for having a knack for fusing together the latest chart hits with timeless power ballads of yesteryear and topping them off with hip-hop beats. You can say what you want about people who “mashup” songs, but there’s no arguing that Girl Talk’s end product is extremely fun to listen to! It should see me through a few miles anyway.

Of course, once I figured that I was craving an eclectic mix of rock and electro, 2 Many DJ’s / Soulwax immediately sprung to mind. As well as consistently knocking out top-class remix after top-class remix of some of the best songs released on the alternative scene over the years, they’re also infamous for their “As Heard on Radio Soulwax” series which were sets of (usually) alternative songs that were transformed thanks to the magic Soulwax touch. With 2 Many DJ’s, you can expect great songs to somehow be made better and you’ll find yourself growing fond of songs that you weren’t too keen on to start with! Admittedly, some of their sets sound as if they don’t really have their shit together, but most of them sound as if they were hand-picked for me!

There is absolutely tonnes of material from both of those artists available free online (as in legally). I’d advise you to seek them out if you’re growing tired of the music typically found in gyms! Hopefully I won’t have any carpet burn to report!

Tonight saw one of the best value games being held in Blazin’ Aces in a long time which may have cost everyone €80 to play, but $50 is being reimbursed onto our Ladbrokes account. I haven’t checked the exchange rates in a while, but I’m pretty sure the dollar hasn’t jumped in value to make paying €80 for the $50 transfer worthwhile in itself, so the €3,000 prizepool in the tournament was also well worth playing for!

When the tournament started, I asked for a cup of coffee and took my seat. For about three orbits of the table, it’s like I have butter on my hands because I just can’t catch a card! I was just about to complain out loud when I find Queens in the small blind. The crying baby gets the bottle I think to myself as I see 4 players limp into my small blind. I make the obligatory raise and get just the one caller – the button. We see a flop of 5-6-9, with two clubs on board and I bet out 1500 which is around 2/3 the pot. I get minraised (and a bit) to 3500. I kind of freeze for a moment. Surely he’s raising his button with tens and better preflop so his range for raising the flop like this must be made up purely of sets and flush draws with the overs, but never something like AK or AQ which he probably would have raised with preflop. I really want to fold, but I call which is horrible, I know. The turn completes the flush draw AND the straight draw and I check-fold when he bets 3000… into a pot of almost 10k.

A few orbits later and I get my coffee. I take a sip and see two queens again. Alex raises under the gun to 550 with blinds at 100/200. He’s fond of the minraise and a bit in all kinds of positions at the table so I wouldn’t read too much into that. I’m a sat a few seats behind him, in early position, and make it 1800. It’s folded around to the small blind who calls. He’s just arrived at the table and I have never seen him in my life but I tend to assign new players to the table a pretty generic range of hands until I see evidence to prove otherwise. I think it’s quite prudent to do this at the table as it means you don’t get into any nasty spots with players whose tendencies you have no idea of! Anyway, I rarely think that a new player to the table is going to flat call a 3bet and then call a shove, so when Alex ships from under the gun when action gets back to me, it’s usually going to be followed by a fistpump. In this case it wasn’t. He had Aces.

I didn’t even have time to finish my coffee!

I eagerly await the $50 to arrive into my Ladbrokes account, but in the meantime I’ll have to try find something to keep me occupied and I think I’ve found something in the form of a gym membership. Running around like a Duracell bunny on Wednesday reminded me that I like to exercise so I looked into joining the local Kingfisher gym and have been offered a day pass to check out the place before committing. They offer some great Student deals so I look forward to trying out the place tomorrow! Even if the place isn’t to my liking, I at least get to kill a few hours before work!

I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve been bitten by the Guitar Hero bug that’s caught hold of so many other people before me! While it’s mostly a party game to throw on when you have people around for beers and what not, some practice in your spare time doesn’t go astray! Let’s face it, none of us want to be that person who can’t even complete a song on Easy!

I was rocking out to Muse’s Knights of Cidonia, desperately trying to get my hand through what could well be considered a decent proposal for the “Finger Olympics”. All was going well, and I was really getting into it (banish all imagery of me alone and jumping up and down in my room from your minds please). All WAS going well until I experienced a sound that almost convinced me that I had just stood on the tails of a thousand cats!

I looked around… no cats. I looked back at the TV and the solo that I was well on my way to nailing had paused on my screen. And still there was the screeching! I assumed it was just one of your average system crashes so I put down the guitar for a moment and restarted the Xbox. Nothing. Nothing but a flashing beam of red light that is. I nearly didn’t want to have a closer look, afraid of what I was going to see. I suspect that I felt the same way a driver feels during those few seconds when they realise they’ve just hit a dog only my own experience was going to be far less gory to face – but just as painful!

Sure enough, 3 flashing red lights greeted me when I turned around the Xbox to have a look. I wasn’t quite sure what the 3 red lights meant exactly beyond the fairly obvious fact that it was fucked! Luckily for me, 360s have a three year warranty to cover this very problem. Unluckily for me, or perhaps appropriate for me, I’m cheap and bought the 360 second hand and now I didn’t know where I stood with it. An afternoon of calling Microsoft and Gamestop didn’t really appeal to me but I knew that I had to, otherwise I’d just leave it on the long finger – a solution that I’ve grown far too fond of despite realising that it’s not really a solution at all!

That was two months a go.

In the two months that my 360 has been “resting” beside my TV gathering dust, I’ve learnt that GameStop won’t accept any responsibility because it’s past their own warranty. Not having a receipt doesn’t really help my case either and Microsoft refuse to even acknowledge that there’s a problem as the 360 is registered in someone elses name and for all they know, is stolen! They won’t do anything unless I can send them a picture of me, the xbox and the receipt – together, like one happy and broken family! Now I couldn’t even tell you where my Birth Cert is, let alone a receipt for something I bought nearly 2 years a go. I could check my bank statements to see when I bought it and then go into GameStop and ask for a copy of the receipt for be printed out but I need to enter in a code from my own secure code card to access my statements. A secure code card? Sounds important. Also sounds like something I’d lose as soon I get it!

So to bring you up to speed (and to remind myself of the hoops I have to jump through), I have to ring AIB to ask for a new Code Card. Fast forward a week and I’ll hopefully be able to check my statements online and discover when exactly I bought it. I can then get a receipt from GameStop and then send off all the documentation to Microsoft who’ll probably take a week to respond with something like “too blurry, send again”. When I finally get the all clear from Microsoft, I can ask them to send me out a box. When that arrives, I put my expensive brick into it and send it off to Germany where some technician is going to blow some air into it and declare it as being as good as new. Some weeks later, the courier will arrive at my door with the resurrected xbox and all order will be restored!

In reading back over that, it all sounds like an awful lot of effort to go through. I’ll even speculate that the prolonged exposure to red tape and bureaucracy could make me violently ill! It’s only a 360 for Christ’s sake. On the one hand, I shouldn’t be worrying about it too much, but on the other, I shouldn’t have to jump through more hoops than there are at Crufts just to get a replacement!

Fuck it, I’ll just get a new one.

Problem solved.

Now have a song.

As I’m sure anyone who’s ever accidentally stumbled online at 4am will know, I’m quite the nocturnal creature. I’m usually in bed by midnight, because to be honest I have nothing else better to be doing. I always find something to distract me though and the fact that I have my laptop beside me and more recently a Guitar Hero controller close to hand as well, only serves to ensure that I’m never asleep by anything that even resembles a civilised hour!

Over the weekend I found myself overcome with a brief bout of insomnia which saw me wander the streets of Waterford until 7am Sunday morning with nothing but the odd tumbleweed to keep me company. This was all after bringing a friend home who’d probably seen better days after leaving a club! You’d have thought that carrying dead weight for a mile would be enough to tire me out, but all it did was make me miss my beloved Apache Pizza and become so hungry that my stomach became a beatbox. Centra eventually opened at 7:15 and I fell into the trap of actually believing that they’d have the breakfast roll I was so desperately craving at the ready! Instead I settled on what was probably a three day old sandwich and set off on the trek home. If only I could sleep…

The walk home sure did make me tired. By time I got home, I felt as if my feet had not only worn through my socks but had also had a fair go at breaking down my shoes! I confess that at this stage, all I wanted to do was drop onto any surface that would support my weight and just hibernate until sometime around Christmas, it didn’t even have to be comfy – as long as I couldn’t roll off it or have it bite me, I was considering it! However, two things kept me from drifting off into slumber land. 1) I was due to work in a few hours and 2) I spent the last tenner I had in my wallet on that blasted gone off sandwich! So my choices were somewhat limited. I could either stop, drop and fall unconscious for about 14 hours and worry about having to live off the crumbs in between the cushions of my couch for the rest of the week when it came to it, or I could “play through the pain” and fire up the Xbox for a few hours before heading to work with a flask of coffee so strong that it would have the consistency and taste of tar! I chose the latter, albeit without the flask.

Now the first few hours weren’t actually that bad. In fact, I even text one of my friends who I knew was lumbered with an early shift, boasting that I had it easy, doing nothing but sitting down on MSN while every now and again signing someone up to Ladbrokes. I couldn’t help but laugh when they text back saying that they were running around with trays of drinks and food with the sweat pouring out of them! God almighty must have been watching though, because seconds later my boss came over and sent me in to deal on a table! Oh Christ! At this stage I could barely even remember my name, let alone how to deal cards! In fact, on the very first hand I sat in, I collected the antes from the table before dealing out a flop. “We’re all playing the board so?” I heard one player say, somewhat inquisitively as it dawned on me that I hadn’t even dealt cards to the players! Now usually these situations go from bad to worse but this was rock bottom and I figured that things could only get better. They just had to!

How I struggled through the next few hours is beyond me! I was just cruising through the night on autopilot, in desperate yet rapidly waining hope that someone would spot that I looked to be aging at a rate of 10 years for every hour I sat in that dealer chair robotically calling out the words “Pass”, “Fold” and “Raise” over and over again. What I had at one stage would have been at most a 5 hour shift was fast approaching 14 hours! It was at this stage that I really started to regret boasting about my “easy shift” earlier on. It was only then that I decided that I should ask to go home. 10 minutes later and I was home and taking off my clothes with my trusty bed just inches away, inviting me in. I’m sure you’re aware of the old cliche of falling asleep as soon as your head hit the pillow, well here’s a new one for you; My head didn’t even have to hit to pillow to fall asleep! I know it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue but the very fact that I still had one sock on the next morning means I’m not making it up!

I managed to squeeze every bit of sleep out of this occasion as I possibly could and I finally woke up 15 hours later, which was probably the total combined amount of sleep I had got the week before! My only complaint (oh here he goes again) was that I had these really vivid dreams that were about Saturday night which in itself isn’t too bad, as long as I can remember that they were dreams, but roll on a few days and I completely forget which had led to a few “Did I?” moments complete with temporary paralysis that lasts a few seconds when I look back at the night! The trick is to not think about that night though and I’m near certain that the copious amounts of tequila that I intend to throw back (but hopefully not up) this Saturday will see to it that last weekend (and the vivid, freaky memories) becomes a thing of the past!

After waking up and looking at the time, I quickly realised that college that day was a non-runner, especially given that it was 6pm. I was still quite tired so I just took it easy for what was left of the day and I managed to fall asleep for midnight Surely a record for me! And then, something strange happened to me when I woke this morning after getting another good nights sleep. I felt oddly energetic, enthusiastic and dare I say it, happy! Perhaps 4 hours a night isn’t enough after all! Making college in time for my first lecture will probably go down as one of my milestones of the year. It wasn’t the rush in at the last minute type of punctual either as I even had time to get breakfast – another first!

This evening I played in my regular 5-a-side game and for the first time since the games inception, I wasn’t begging to go on goal after 5 minutes of play. It was as if I had a giant Duracell stuck to my back and I even jogged home because I fancied the work out. Can I really put all this down to getting sleep? Well, it’s either that or I’m drinking some funny water!

I’m going to conclude this post with something new to this blog – a song. A song that I fully believe will be both a chart topper AND an Indie floor filler this Summer. They’re a band called Phoenix, who seem to have a knack for releasing fantastically playable Summer soundtracks. This song is from their forthcoming album “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” and it’s called 1901. Enjoy!