I'm off to Riga on Wednesday. Naturally since I'm travelling there's some inconvenience going on in the country. This time it's the NATO conference.

On another travel note, I've decided I'm going to Venezuela on February. I'm planning to buy the ticket tomorrow when I decide which airline I'm travelling with. The choice is between Air France and Iberia. While Air France is cheaper they don't allow any changes the travel dates. On the other hand, Iberia allow changes (at a cost of 165 Euros) but the ticket costs more and there's an overnight stay involved. Last Saturday I went to a travel agent and she told me that Iberia will pay for the hotel for the overnight stay, however I'm not really convinced so I've got to check with the airline office first.

In the mean time all the cat lovers and anybody in need of a smile should must visit this site ... Funny cats collected

I managed to finish the Tip a Day project. This is a list of all the tips in the series:

• Tip 1: Synonymn and NOT web searches
• Tip 2: Use your homepage as a reminder
• Tip 3: Multiple home pages in Firefox
• Tip 4: Restoring pre 2.0 tab behaviour in Firefox
• Tip 5: Date Arithmetic in Excel
• Tip 6: Reclaim disk space disable hibernation
• Tip 7: Restore missing desktop icon
• Tip 8: Invoking oracle tools with sysdba role
• Tip 9: Middle mouse button click
• Tip 10: Time wasting
• Tip 11: Disable system restore for improved performance
• Tip 12: Icons in system tray
• Tip 13: Speed testing your internet
• Tip 14: Removing auto-startup programs
• Tip 15: Quick Searches in Firefox
• Tip 16: Note taking software
• Tip 17: Currency conversion with Google
• Tip 18: Selecting text with ALT
• Tip 19: Synchronising Firefox Bookmarks
• Tip 20: GTD TiddlyWiki - Productivity tool
• Tip 21: Why I use Winamp and not other media players
• Tip 22: Tracking down large files
• Tip 23: Google Game - GoogleWhack
• Tip 24: Back to the past
• Tip 25: Application Shortcuts
• Tip 26: Play Quicktime and Real Player files without installing the applications
• Tip 27: Automatic log file
• Tip 28: Converting a FAT filesystem to NTFS
• Tip 29: Pausing Applications in *nix
• Tip 30: Word Count in vi
• Tip 31: WinXP Funnies

The pubs in Galway are great. They've got a roof. Roof very good. Roof very important. All I needed in these 3 days was a roof. When we arrived (went there with a hairy old school friend of mine and his friend) it was raining, when we left it was raining and in between it was raining too. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it, but it was raining - if you know what I mean.

We stayed at the Sleepzone hostel which is about 5 minutes walk from the main square (Eyre Sq) in the centre. On Friday evening we went to Fibber Magees and Paddy's (Pscino) While Fibber's resembled a normal pub, Paddy's was hamalississimu (I don't know the word in English for this one).

On Saturday we went by bus to Clifden a small city on the coast of Connemara. The bus was cosy and outside it was … guess what … raining, but that didn't take anything from beauty of the autumn tinge in the undulating hills and farmland. The only pity was that we couldn't stop and take some pictures, so now we the hairy one gets his Saab we can go again and snap a couple. In Clifden we tempted fate and went for a walk to the beach, and promptly enough as soon as we were turned our backs to return to the village, it started pouring again. We sought refuge at Mitchell's Restaurant and I felt I deserved a treat for braving the weather. I had Connemara oysters and a white Chardonnay. It was a pity seeing that aphrodisiac boost wasted but the oysters were great.

In the evening we went to Ming's Chinese restaurant and had hot and sour soup and roast duck. The food was delicious and filling. From the way the people where dressed the restaurant seemed quite above to our scrawny looks, but then again we were 'tourists'. We hit the pubs at about 9 and the streets were already beaming with life. The nightlife starts very early here – in fact on Friday the roads were void of sober people at 1am. The night passed rather uneventfully.

The hostel had a stupid policy of closing the kitchen between 10am and noon for cleaning. This complete inconsideration towards people prefer to exist on a Saturday night was a royal pain in the ass on Sunday morning. We checked out from the hostel and the weather had not yet changed. We walked to Eyre Square looking for something to do but nothing seemed viable so we ended up on a comfortable sofa in the living room of the Great Southern Hotel (4 star luxury hotel). We spent the rest of the morning reading the Sunday Independent, having coffee and home baked (or hotel baked) biscuits. For lunch we went to McSwiggans Bar and Restaurant. I had a succulent roast chicken with mushrooms and bacon sauce, complemented with tap water. In the afternoon we went to Fibber Magees again and watched Ireland win over Australia in the rugby match.

Recapitulating: Galway was very wet but the food was great. Try the seafood in Connemara if you go there – which you should.

I admit I'm a keyboard lover which means I love keyboard shortcuts and the keys have almost faded. To set a short cut to an application in Windows:

• Right click on the application shortcut
• Select Properties
• In the short cut field key in the shortcut by pressing the shortcut buttons

There are some times when the shortcut doesn't work. I still don't know why, but in the majority of cases it does work.

Update: If this news is true Cohen should be shot

As everybody I met recently knew about this movie, I'll start by explaining the rating. Borat (review) is a funny film, a very funny film. But it is over hyped. I think it isn't worth all the fuss people made about it. It's a good movie but you don't need to pull your hair out if you miss it at the cinema. That said if you want to go to the cinema the trailers they showed didn't offer any interesting alternatives so for that reason you might as well go and watch Borat. Rating 3.5/5

Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a journalist in Kazakhstan who got an assignment to go to the US to learn the American way of life to suggest improvements for Kazakhstan. Watch the trailer at the official Website.The film starts in Kazakhstan with Borat introducing the village people including the village rapist, the 4th classified prostitute whom he French kisses and later introduces as his sister, his wife who promises to cut off his pole if he misbehaves in the US, and some other villagers. The way Borat speaks is the most defining characteristic of Cohen and I'm sure that I'm going to hear somebody speaking 'Borat's English' very soon.

The introduction gives you a taste of the humour you're to expect from the film. It's full of explicit language, sexual references, and brutal culture bashing. The film is offensive an in the offensiveness lies most of its humour. The only part I thought was insulting was the introduction which portrayed Kazakhstan badly, but that's because I've got a soft spot for these countries. This only lasted for the first five minutes of the film, because the rest of the film has absolutely nothing to do with Kazakhstan.

Borat travels to New York to start the documentary. He starts by stressing his uncivilised nature by thinking that the hotel lift is his hotel room and washing his face with toilet water. Then he settles on the bed to watch TV and from a rerun of Baywatch he learns about Pamela Anderson, who has the ass of a 7 year old, and decides that he wants to marry her. The news that his wife died is greeted with a high-five, and off he goes from New York to California to find Pamela. During the road trip through America, Borat meets people from different sub-cultures like the feminists, the black gangs, a traditional American dinner and the Jews. The Jews are given the worst treatment of them all, and I found the gag of the shape shifters hilarious.

Enough said about the jokes not to spoil the fun. The film is full of jokes and I don't think there is a minute that passes without a joke being made. The good thing about the jokes is that they're fast jokes and they end the minute they start so they don't get long winded.

I'm starting a new game. This may be a bit more intellectually demanding than the boyfriend or the 'where I'm from' games, but hopefully more rewarding. Actually I might start a new section in the blog called silly games.

The game is this: Ask 10 questions regarding any profession. The questions must be directly related to the profession not generic questions.

My first set of questions is for an unconventional job in the software industry. The documentation writer.

1. What type of documentation do you usually write (user manuals, API documentation, or other documentation)?
2. With the event of the web many programs are publishing their documentation on the web. What medium do you prefer for publishing documentation, web or HTML, PDF files or printed documentation?
3. With whom do you interact most in the development team to write the documentation?
4. What part of the documentation do you prefer writing?
5. Have you got any tricks of the trade of making your documentation more accessible to be understood by the non-technical person?
6. What do you think about the quality software documentation in general?
7. Do you feel that your role in the production of software is appreciated enough?
8. Would you write documentation for an open source project?
9. Did you ever contribute to improve the usability of a product while you were documenting it?
10. What do you think is the major shortcoming software developers have when they write the documentation themselves?

If you're a documentation writer and would like to reply, please feel free to comment.

You're also free to play along and write your own 10 questions to a profession of your choice. What I might try to do is find some people with blogs in the mentioned profession and ask them to answer the questions.

Are you following the New Zealand Travelogue and the Technology Tip of the Day in the travel and technology sections? As of 23rd February these sections have been subdivided into separate blogs with their own RSS feed and interface.

Remember that experiment with the colour, animal, body of water, and room? Well here's the reason for it. In Diary, Chuck Palahniuk says that Carl Jung used these questions to represent these things :-

• The Colour and description of the colour you gave are representative of how you think about yourself.
• The Animal is other people.
• The body of water is your sex life.
• And, the all white room is your thoughts on death.

Autumn’s well in season and with the pavements covered in orange leaves come the longer nights and cold weather. With the new time now it’s getting dark at around 5 and the weather has been very cold. All this is a great excuse to indulge in indoor pursuits in my warm cozy room. This is also a good chance to give my liver a break and give it a fair chance to continue fighting. I’m getting this shirt.

Since my parents came over to courier the PC, it has been working hard to make up for its six months rest. I remembered that you can use the PC to play games so I got hold of GTA: San Andreas and am wrecking havoc in the city of Los Santos. I’ve also installed Chess Master again which will probably mean that I’m likely to fall into the chess mood anytime soon. When I’m tired of hearing the PC's hum which sounds horrible in this silent house, I’m either reading or sleeping. Books have become almost a vice and since I’ve learnt about Amazon Used & New there have been an average of 3 books arriving each week for the last two weeks. At the moment Dogs of Riga, Data Quality and OLAP solutions are on the top of the stack.

Work is all good. There’s a good vibe in the office and I’m doing some fun stuff I really wanted to do before but never got into actually doing it. Here I finally found the motivation to do it in an applicable context. Now I can say that I’ve come to the stage where novelty starts wearing off and work forms part of the daily routine. I don’t mean this in a bad way it’s just that it doesn’t feel like an extended holiday anymore. This is probably the effect of going on a real holiday and returning back here enforcing the fact that now this is home.

Word: poignant
Meaning:

1. keenly distressing to the feelings: poignant regret
2. keen or strong in mental appeal: a subject of poignant interest
3. affecting or moving the emotions: a poignant scene.
4. pungent to the smell: poignant cooking odours.
5. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary)

Synonyms: intense, bitter, heartfelt

Word: adroit
Meaning:

1. expert or nimble in the use of the hands or body
2. cleverly skillful, resourceful or ingenious: an adroit debater
3. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary)

Synonyms: skillful, clever, apt, deft

Word: loiter
Meaning:

1. To stand idly about; linger aimlessly
2. To proceed slowly or with many stops: loitered all the way home.
3. To delay or dawdle: loiter over a task.
4. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

Synonyms: waste time, wait, linger
Usage: The high school students like to loiter in the Central Square.

It's been some time since I've enjoyed the movies even more so when you consider that the last film I watched, The History Boys, stimulated my homophobic glands as no other film has ever done before. The comeback to the cinema could hardly have been any better when last Friday I went to watch The Departed (review - 93%) directed by Martin Scorsese.

The story is set in South Boston where mobster Frank Costello (Jack Nicolson) is the most wanted criminal by the local police force. A team of police lead by Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) set upon the tracks of Costello and amongst them there is Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) who as a child grew in graces of Costello, and now is a mole in the police force for his old mentor. Billy Costigan (Leonardo Di Caprio) is the other hot-shot who graduated with Sullivan however because of his dirty family history, he is sent as an undercover agent with Costello's gang to incriminate the Irish mob leader.

As the main actors settle in their respective roles the two cross each other's paths without knowing the identity of the respective opponent, and the plot soon turns into a race of who'll manage to outwit the other. This keeps the suspense of the film sky-high while the two struggle with the psychological consequences of their chosen paths, and a shared girlfriend Madolyn (Vera Farminga).

While the cast is great and all the actors are outstanding I couldn't help thinking that Di Caprio's role would have been better suited for somebody else. Without taking anything of his performance, which is arguably the best one in the film, I think his face is too babyish for the role of tough undercover agent.

What I liked most about the film was that it's not the usual gangster film with gangs shooting each other. The idea of two rats on either side of the playing field is so good that you'd wish that you were the one who came up with it. Towards the end there are a couple of twists peaking in the elevator where the whole situation is resolved. I didn't find a boring minute from the 149 that make the film and I think this film well deserves a rating of 90%+ on rotten tomatoes. 4/5 stars.

Click on image to view account

Found via Stumbleupon.com

I've created a photo gallery for my New Zealand photos. Photos are going to be added with new articles in the travelogue in the travel section. You can find links to the first two galleries here in the table of contents.

You can comment on the photos in smugmug.

Come on I need some replies on this. I'll tell you why later.

• Name your favourite color and 3 words to describe why?
• Name your favourite animal and 3 words to describe why?
• Name a body of water and 3 words to describe why?
• Describe how you would feel if you were locked in a white room with nothing in it but a simple wooden bench on which you were sitting naked, waiting?

Word: gloat
Meaning:

1. To feel or express great, often malicious, pleasure or self-satisfaction. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

Synonyms: crow, brag
Usage: Don't gloat over your rival's misfortune.