I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 this morning. What else would you be doing at 5am on a Saturday anyway?

They call the release Dexter after some tenor saxophonist I never heard of. Bet he was loud though. But that’s neither here nor there. What is important is that the site is working both for you as a reader and me as a ranter.

I’ve changed a couple of things. The colour scheme for one. Let me know if it is okay. I think it is a bit less harsh on the eye myself, but then I don’t have to read this stuff.

I also added AJAX commenting so the page doesn’t reload after you submit. Feel free to try this out. There were some issues with AJAX so if you find you can’t submit a comment let me know by mail (primalsneeze [ag] topmail [ponc] ie) and I’ll disable it.

There is also a check box so you can get mail if there are follow comments. These two are dependent on having Javascript enabled by the way.

The above is important. The below is just of interest. Maybe.

What’s new in 2.3? I hear all one of you scream. Well the visual editor is better - It has an Advanced Toolbar with buttons for Undo/Redo; text colour; paste text from Word (why anyone would use Word is beyond me); special characters like ø, © and ♣, so now all those Norwegian card-playing lawyers can use WordPress too. All great for folks who don’t like messing with HTML.

And the best part is underline is now supported in posts and comments. So you can shout at me without having to use capitals. There are a few other bits and pieces such as Clean up Messy Code, but I won’t go into them now.

The upgrade itself took about 5minutes - the testing nearly two hours - but I may have missed something. So let me know if you have any problems.

See what I did there? 12A - Just in case any readers have triskaidekaphobia. I don’t personally, though I do have a fear of the number 19.99. You know when you press €20 on the ATM and it laughs at you saying bugger off, you have insufficient funds. Wouldn’t you think ATM’s with all the cash they have could spare one miserable little cent?

Sam’s back. Actually she back two days but I only noticed now. For those of you new to blogland go check out The Problem Child Bride. Read her back catalogue. You won’t be disappointed. If you are not happy, Lever Brothers will give you your money back.

I can’t find any of those Lever Brothers Surf ads from the nineties with Biddy from Glenroe, but this rip-off of one of them for a programme on RTÉ is even funnier*.

Oh, and the Kav lad is back too. Well, back-ish. He has a new phone though and that’s all that really matters. Newbies are advised to check him out too. Try his Greatest Shits section first and ease yourself in.

Speaking of back - I want my dog back. He’s deserted me for the builders. He never leaves their side. The proof is below. I had a private detective follow him for days. I’ll need all the help I can get in the doggie-divorce court.

*Actually it’s not funny at all unless you are familiar with the original TV ads.

A woman over the road from me inherited the house when her folks passed away years ago. With the kids getting bigger, she and her husband decided it might be a good time to build on the room or two they were dithering over.

They, or rather she, as the property is in her name, had only minor difficulties getting planning permission. Just the usual move the boundary in 2 metres to facilitate road widening lark, which as we all know means, if you want permission then donate your land now so we don’t have to pay you for it later if we ever decide to upgrade the road.

Getting a loan wouldn’t be a problem either. Her mortgage broker assured her that given their combined salaries it would be plain sailing. They later rang to say it had been approved and would come through soon.

A builder was hired and work began. After all, the mortgage money would arrive any day.

After a couple of weeks she became a bit concerned and called the broker.
- Oh, we’re just waiting on you to send us the letter from your current or last mortgage provider, that’s all.
- Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were waiting on me to do something?
- Ah shur, it’s standard practice. Everyone knows it. So just get us the letter and we’re flying.
- I can’t get a letter. I never had a mortgage before.
- Well can you get a letter from them to say that?
- From whom?
- From your last mortgage provider, of course.
- Listen to me closely: I never, ever, ever had a mortgage before.
- That’s very strange. Are you sure? You are 38 according to the computer. You must have had one. Are you making a mistake?
- Look, I never had one. I inherited this house.
- Oh, I see. Hold on. I’ll have to check with my boss. … … … He says you have to get a letter from a solicitor or commissioner for oaths to say you never had a mortgage.
- Is it really necessary? Solicitors are expensive.
- Oh, you have to do it because the mortgage crowd think you had a mortgage before.
- Why would they think that?
- Because I ticked the form to say you had. You are 38 after all.

It went on. And on. And on. And she had to go to a solicitor. The builder pulled plant when he learned his first payment wasn’t coming. She’s up the walls. Though not of the new part of the house. They aren’t built yet. Winter’s coming and they may not be built this side of Christmas. And there was she thinking that dealing with the civil service would be the hard part.

Lidl and Aldi are great. There, I said it. They are the Ryanairs of supermarkets but without the abusive staff and hidden charges. You’ll even find them close to town centres not a two hour train journey away.

I began visiting Lidl a couple of years back for a very valid reason: I was told to. Back then they were doing the haul out a pallet of stuff, drop it on the floor and let the scavengers pick it to the boards thing. A lot of the food was gank then too. Russian tinned meats and Russian dog food - if it weren’t for the pictures on them you couldn’t tell the difference.

But things have changed. The displays are neatly stacked out. They now stock a lot of Irish and UK made produce - meaning you can read the labels. Fluency in 17 languages is no longer a prerequisite. The staff are friendly, not that they weren’t before. If something’s shite, return it, no problem, sir, here’s your 23c refund. Imagine telling Ryanair that flight was shite, take me back home. It, and you, wouldn’t fly.

Besides the prices, what I like most about Lidl is the big wide aisles. Fifteen fat brides could reach the alter simultaneously. Big aisles are essential if you suffer from trolley rage like me. Even if the fifteen fat brides dumped their trolleys and buggered off for a quickie with the bestmen, I would still have room to navigate my way around the store.

These days, certain products draw me back to Lidl again and again. The German beers and the cooked meats. Fairtrade coffee and chocolate. They do a great value loo roll branded Aloe Vera that is just class. Aloe Vera as in the plant not Coronation Street. Scented, soft and strong, yet half the price of the stuff either the puppy or the bear make.

For goods like that Lidl can’t be beaten. But a word of caution: I also keep an unlist - what not to buy.

Socks. Don’t buy them. Your toes will go straight through the first time you throw a kick at the cat.

Jocks. Never again. I got a four pack for €3 and can’t wear them. A bit like the village of Sallins in my parents’ day - no ballroom. And they tend to drift into the middle and get eaten by your arse. Very uncomfortable.

Cornflakes. Yeuch! It took me a month to get through a 500g pack of tiny pieces of cardboard. No, it wasn’t a jigsaw I bought.

Dog food. Even the flies turned up their tentacles at it.

Toothpaste. Tastes like paste. What kind, I don’t know.

Bread. Not all. Some. Stayed fresh for ages. Too long, in fact. Obviously so packed with preservatives there wasn’t room for flour.

What do you like/dislike from the Lidl range? Chat away among yourselves, I have to go do the shopping.

Read Back to School #1, #2 and #3.

Annie’s heading back to school today to study her film stuff. Fair play! Good on you girl! That’s what reminded me I never finished this series.

It also reminds me I was working on a film set shortly before going back to school myself. On the last day it drizzled non stop while we were shooting scenes of a country fair. A year later I saw the final product at the cinema and there I was, cheering on a Pit Bull terrier (don’t ask) in glorious sunshine. My hair, such as it is, wasn’t even wet. This must be the magic Annie will be learning at Hogwarts Motion Picture Academy. She may also learn how to make scenes shot at 8am on a Sunday morning in a gay bar look like midnight in a buzzing singles nightclub bursting with hot Russian nymphomaniacs.

But anyway, back to the back to school thing.

Exams. Jayzez! The very thoughts of them had me in bits. Remember the nightmares you had for months about the Leaving Cert? You walk into the hall for your maths exam only to be handed the geography paper. Or the day before French you realise you had no teacher all year and the Head had said to study on your own, but of course you didn’t. Well I had those same ones again in the run up to the set in January of the year one. They lessened after that but never went away totally.

Just arrived in the carpark the morning of my very first exam in 16 years I got a call to say my best friend had died. All academic worries flew out the window narrowly missing a groundsman, fluttered about for a minute then transformed into how I was going to get to the funeral. Could I get flights? Could I afford them? Would their availability mean I would miss more than one exam? On the other end of the line, his wife calmly convinced me that my exams were more important than a religious ceremony that not one of the three of us believed in. I wrote a line at the top of the answer book: Dedicated to the memory of the best friend I ever had. Eemondt, if I make a bollix of this, it’s your fault, mate.

As the weeks passed the thoughts of exams faded. Until the days before the results were due. The hardened students said they’d be out two days before the official date and they were. First class honours in most subjects, 2.1’s in the rest. I was ecstatic and very, very tired and emotional (just like a celeb) that evening.

But hold on. I genuinely didn’t do that well. Okay, I had built up good scores in my lab work which counted for 30-40% of the overall. But I had lost the plot in a couple of exams and knew in my heart, liver and kidneys I’d made a rat’s rectum of them. If I performed as poorly during my primary degree all those years ago I would have been failed or just passed. I knew this because I did and I was.

The standards had slipped. It was obvious when I thought about it. It was glaringly obvious the day year two began when I seen all the people I assumed would fail and not be allowed back. People who quite literally couldn’t string two lines of code together by the end of year one. People who still hadn’t grasped the concept of a binary tree. People who hadn’t the slightest interest in the course.

Marking standards were lowered for sure, but so too was course content and quantity. How often had we been told not to worry about the public static void main (String[] args) line in Java? Apparently we didn’t need to know what it’s purpose was. It might be explained in third year undergrad.

Some of the labs were painfully and embarrassingly simplistic - type this in and see what happens. No need to report your findings. No need to understand why the outcome is as it is. Just observe.

The postgrads told me they had already covered topics like Huffman coding, hash tables and heaps in year one.

You can put on your conspiracy hats and tell me why this is so. I’m sure some of you will have plenty to say. Is it because fees are the lifeblood of a university and accepting all comers into year one and passing them into year two ensures funding? Is it so that Bertie can tell the world how many technical graduates Ireland is turning out each year?

This, needless to say, burst my bubble somewhat. To be honest to myself I would have to be scoring firsts or high seconds to achieve anything worthwhile. That is the goal I then set myself.

• Eolaí is ar ais arís in Ireland after 8 years, 5 months, 2 weeks and 3 days in Kansas. If it was murder he’d be out long ago. Anyway, pop over and say welcome home, or if you reading this elsewhere, ask him how it’s going.

• Don’t ask him about the weather though. Touchy subject here right now. There was frost on my car this morning. Two brass monkeys came to the door looking for a welder. Yesterday’s weather was menopausal - hot and cold flushes. One minute there’d be glorious sunshine and you’d be sweating like Christy Moore. Then a lazy wind would come from the north and go straight through you rather than around.

• Tom Raftery braved the weather to post on Wunbi, a new and free installer for Ubuntu. Excellent for those who are scared of attempting a Linux install without getting an adult geek to hold the scissors or turn on the gas. It’s completely point-and-click.

• For uber-uber-uber geeks there is an excellent article in this month’s IEEE magazine, Spectrum, about new research into quantum computing. It really is a new approach! Upside: All the essential ingredients for a quantum computer have been realised. Now we need to integrate them. Downside: A practical quantum computer may be possible within the next few decades. I wonder who much they’ll cost? Will my pension stretch that far?

• If I had a super duper rapid mutt’s-marbles quantum computers right this minute to track down the fekers who skimmed the sibling’s credit card this month. It is one of those fancy shmancy ones with no limit so it caused a bit of a panic. All credit (ha! ha!) to the issuer they refunded the money pending an investigation so there’ll be no interest penalty. More on this when I have it.