NiallOK’s Blog

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I have to go to court this week… but no, I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ll explain,…

I had a brief ‘dabbling’ with the courts system a good few years ago when I was arrested by a rookie garda in Dublin city centre. At the time, I was in a group of people walking up a main street in the city. Without going into too much detail, a few guys in our group (whom I didn’t know) started causing hassle with some club bouncers, who then called the gardaí - a number of whom showed up and started - naturally - asking us to clear away from the area.

Having no wish to get in trouble, I started to leave - but stopped for a chat with another of the gardaí present, actually asking him to explain a section of a legal act that I was curious about - and that another garda had quoted me previously - and he was happy to oblige, explaining it in detail. I got the feeling from him that he realised that I was just a bystander, not involved in the incident at the club door, but while he was chatting with me, the first garda - a trainee - the one who had originally instructed me to move on - came over and formally arrested me for being drunk and disorderly and not moving on when asked. Read the rest of this entry »

Am I the next intended victim of a crazed serial killer?

Well no, it’s all a clever viral campaign for new TV show "Dexter", which is based on a novel about a boy who was adopted by a police officer and has a few homicidal tendencies. It could equally, of course, be an interesting way to surprise a friend that’s into CSI or horror films and all the gore and stuff that goes with them.

Dexter is a serial killer, and in this viral video, your friend is next. You can customise it yourself at IceTruck.tv. It’s then hidden behind a phony YouTube-like viral video site, and emailed off to your friend who should have no clue what’s in store. Nasty, I suppose… but clever.

See my video here. Make your own here.

A mixed bag today…

First off, I return to the airwaves tonight with a live radio request show and I need your requests and comments!

Via Singing Stranger (great blog by the way!) - the Apple Store were selling the Iomega 1TB external Hard Drive for only €29.95! - Looks like they’re removed the product from their virtual shelf now though… what a f**k-up!

Give it 5 minutes… Flip from Reverse Fad may be just a time-wasting way of turning your text upside-down, but it’s also the inspiration for hundreds of digg users who decided that it was a cool way of posting comments. ¡ǝʞı1 ‘ɥbnouǝ ɹıɐɟ…

Okay, this happened back in April, but I’m only noticing it now… was editing my MySpace page and saw a load of “msplinks.com” URLS there in the place of the URLS in my links - but apparently, they’re perfectly legit. via the Webmaster Tips site: MySpace have begun filtering outgoing links using msplinks.com. While your click still (usually) takes you to your destination, it will go through a redirecting site first to filter out spam, phishing and virus sites. Handy, I suppose but I’d suggest they use a javascript mouse hover script too to obscure the ‘ugly’ msplinks url in the status bar! Myspace conspiracy theories aside, apparently it’s caused a few problems with blocking links to peoples personal blogs, youtube, last.fm and bebo so naturally someone’s found a workaround.

Via Safe To Delete, look out! It’s the PC De-Crapifier! - coming along to save the motherf**kin’ day, yeah… and to remove tonnes of useless crap from your PC, uncluttering Windows and (presumably) speeding things up a bit. Warning, though: Use at your own risk!

Donncha and Damien insist that you’re all just jealous… of Cork. I’m not. I’m quite happy to live and work in good old Dundalk (and to be moderating the North East forum and its new county sub-forums [fora?] on boards.ie)! It’s the ideal place to discuss the town - check it out!

I spent the bulk of today in Dublin “on business” (not going into details…) after and staying up until pretty late doing a bit of research and drinking quite a bit of Jameson last night, and now I’m home, I’m about ready to pass out. Took a couple (literally) of pictures while up in de big schmoke though. More often than not, when I’m in Dublin, I seem to bump into Pat Ingoldsby, writing and selling his poems on the street. Last time I met him he asked me to run up to the Kylemore café and grab him a bag of chips. He’s a lovely chap so I did what he asked. This time, he was grumbling at a bunch of pedestrians because they couldn’t speak a word of Irish, so I didn’t approach him. Zoom in on the picture above and here we have him:

The piece of paper stuck to the grey thing says “SLOW - Poet ahead”.

Found it strange, considering recent goings-on, that I didn’t see a single black Volkswagen Passat car throughout the whole day and thought maybe this conspiracy that was in my head was over - or, at least, that maybe it only happens in Dundalk. But then this guy walks past me and gives me a fairly sinister look:



At first I thought nothing of it but then he left his bike at the kerb and went into a shop … and on closer inspection… OMG… ITS A PASSAT!!!



Cue brain going into conspiracy theory overdrive. They’re following me! They’re following me! Who are “they”? I dunno! Help! Nurse! … etc.

As I mentioned before, it seems I’m being followed around town by black Volkswagen Passats. Well it’s still going on and I’m seeing up to ten of them a day in my (very short) travels around Dundalk. My Lynx Clicker is getting plenty of use… Here’s one I saw at KFC yesterday - the 4th one of 5 I encountered in a roughly 1 mile journey home from work. Mad coincidence… I’m sure…

(Yes, obviously, I’ve obscured the registration no.)

[Edit]: A workmate has suggested that maybe my fiancèe has hired some spies to keep an eye on me and that the spies all drive black Passats… Er…