bordagen

This is quite possibly both the greatest and saddest thing I have ever seen.

It is someone drawing an anime character in HTML with some really bad Japanese rave music playing in the background.

Last night we got back from our overnight in Dublin. Liz, a few friends and I managed to get some flights from Leeds/Bradford – Dublin for 2p return. Not bad going.

I would have been really sad and done a live blog of the event, but I didn’t for a few reasons:

• There was no free WiFi access, plus I had no way of using the any WiFi access
• I was drunk
• I couldn’t be bothered

So I did the next saddest thing and wrote the entries on my phone to type up later. Sadly because I had no mobile signal I couldn’t send them to myself so I had to save the messages to draft so there is no timestamp on them. And yes, I just realised that I could have quite easily written it as a note, but I just remembered about them now.

After arriving in Dublin after a fairly nice flight (if it was a bit shakey on takeoff) we got through the airport and found a taxi to take us to the hotel, The Arlington. After getting checked in to the room and ditching our bags we head out and explore the nearby area. The hotel was just on the other side of the River Liffey so we didn’t have too far to walk to get to Temple Bar where the majority of the pubs are.

The first pub we end up in was the Ha’Penny Bridge Inn, located right near, you’ve guessed it, the Ha’Penny Bridge. It was here that I had my first pint of Guinness of the trip. Sadly though, it wasn’t that nice – although I finished it I didn’t really fancy another one. After that, we went for a bit more of a wander around to find somewhere to eat. The idea of going to the Hard Rock Cafe was thrown in to the ring, but quickly thrown out again since we decided to have a nice traditional Irish meal seeing as we were only there for one night. So we rolled in to Ghallager’s Boxty House. Now at the time I didn’t really know what a boxty was so I ordered a Gaelic boxty which turned out to be irish medallion steaks wrapped in a potato pancake. Very tasty. I had a pint of Murphy’s Red to was it down with. I’d never had a Murpheys before, but the Red variant was very easy to drink with a nice honey taste to it.

It was after that when the group split in two. Some went back to the hotel to get jackets/jumpers whilst the others went over to the Temple Bar pub to get the next drinks in. When we met up, the real drinking began I had a pint of Bud from the tap which was delicious but continued the rest of the night on whiskey. After a while we moved to the next place, The Auld Dubliner for a few and settled there. It was a nice place that was fairly quiet and pretty cheap drinks. After a few there, we traipsed back to the hotel to finish the evening off. It was here that people fittered away and retired to the rooms. Liz, Andy and I stayed there til closing and then went back to out room and stayed up for a few more hours eating chocolate and drinking tea (well, I was anyway). After several 1am phone calls of no-one wanting to join the tea party, we called it a night.

In the morning we woke up, some a little worse for wear, and went downstairs for breakfast – a nice fry-up. We got ready after that and checked out of the hotel and proceeded to join a tour bus around the city. We jumped off the hop-on-hop-off bus at the Guinness brewery where I learnt all the magic that goes in to the process of making the drink. Quite interesting really.

After that, we went to Dublin Zoo for an hour or so before heading back in to the main city for something to eat before the journey home. We ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe which I and some others were very disappointed with the standard of the meal. We then headed back to the hotel to retrieve our bags and proceeded to the airport. Then it started to rain very heavily and some lightening was also involved. Despite this, the flight wasn’t bad compared to the flight to Dublin.

All in all it was a good extended weekend and I wouldn’t mind going back again. Pictures after the jump.

Read more »

I just popped in to Forbidden Planet in town over my lunch break, just on the off chance that they had issue 1 of the (not-so) new Buffy The Vampire Slayer season 8 comic.

I must have been very lucky as they had issues 1-3, including several prints of them and alternate artwork cover issues. Needless to say I snapped them up right away. I was meaning to get them, but it would have cost me twice what I actually paid to get them online. I did forget to pick up some bags and boards for them so I’ll have to be careful on the way home tonight if it is still raining so as not to get them wet.

With any luck the comic series will be as good as the TV show.

After the announcement on Monday about Apple releasing it’s Safari browser to Windows, I decided to give it a go to see any differences from using it on a Mac and how it compares to IE or Firefox.

The Apple site claims that it is quicker than IE7. I’ll agree with that, but only by a small margin, nowhere near as quick as they claim on the Apple site.

The user interface, I’m used to it at work. It’s minimalistic and doesn’t clutter the place up – although the lack of sides or status bar on the bottom of the window is quick unnerving.

Tabbed browsing, the inline Google search and other features are nothing new, plus there is no Address Bar history – so you can’t drop a menu down to see where you’ve been.

All in all, I don’t think that anything new has been brought to the browser in this new release – but then it is only in beta.

One comment that has been floating around that I’ve noticed is the slightly blurry fonts because it uses it’s own font rendering rather than windows, it doesn’t seem as sharp to me.

If you’ve never used it, get it down and see what you think.