Saturday, May 29, 2010

Angler fish sex-life

Wikipedia agrees with this comic strip! How did it take me 35 years to hear about this? I mean how can anyone ever say anything about angler fish on TV and not mention this first?

Sounds like one of these ladies could give George Washington a run for his money.

in reference to: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler (view on Google Sidewiki)

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Dyson marketing... not as great.

Poking around the Dyson website, I found this page about their fancy Dyson Digital Motor. It includes the sentence

And no carbon brushes means no carbon emissions.
Seriously? WTF? I don't think the climate talks in Copenhagen were held to reduce the amount of carbon falling off the carbon brushes in electric motors. These days "carbon emissions" means CO2 and unless you run your house on solar power, anything that draws power from the mains has carbon emissions.

Apparently these motors are very efficient, which will reduce CO2 emissions, but someone in the marketing department had to push it beyond the truth. Ah well, I still like them.

Holy shit, Dyson customer service is perfect!

I bought a Dyson vacuum a few years ago. I never got around to registering it for the 5 year warranty, not sure where the receipt is. During the week the bendy hose broke.

This morning I phoned the customer service number, they took my details, they took the serial number of the vacuum, when I said I didn't know the purchase date they said "the manufacture date is June 06 so it's still in warranty, the hose will be with you in 7 working days". I got a shiver.

From now on, if Dyson make the appliance I want, I'll buy the Dyson model.

Holy shit, again.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Drinking game: porn or not porn

It's amazing how much porn there is on the internet and how often you accidentally stumble across it while looking for something else (honestly, that's why it was on my screen). You can even turn it into a game.

Find an internet image search engine that allows porn in its results (far be it from me to recommend any particular brand in this post!). Ensure that you have turned off any "I don't want porn" settings that the search engine may provide. Here's how the game works:

  1. The typer types in a search but doesn't click "search".
  2. The guesser now has to guess whether the first page of results will include porn.
  3. Click search.
  4. If the guesser was correct, the typer must drink. If guesser was wrong, he must drink.
Take turns being the typer.

The key of course is to come up with search that is very hard to predict, let me start you off with "long wang", "gobbler's knob" and "pants pirate" :-).

You can play with more than 2 players in which case you probably just want everyone including the search-typer to guess and anyone who gets it wrong has to drink.

All good innocent fun!

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Good place for kids: Spraoi

I've been to Spraoi fun-world a few times now and so has Midori but yesterday I was so happy with the place that I need to tell to the world. It's behind Aldi on the Long Mile road.

Food

We started off in the cafe where 2 main courses were more than enough for 2 adults and 2 kids. The baked potato with pesto chicken was very nice and there was loads of it for €6.95 including coleslaw and a salad. Seemed quite healthy and fresh if a little bit too salty. A good lasagne with chips was €7.95; and another €1 for a can of 7 up. Later on in the play area we got 2 ice-cream cones for €1! I was shocked. 50c each makes them probably the cheapest ice-cream cones in Ireland.

While we were waiting for the food the staff were very helpful and even got a ball for Seán to play with. In fact all the staff are helpful and friendly.

Play

For toddlers there's a ball pit and for older kids there'ss a massive complex of ropes, padded bars, swings, balls, 3-storey high slides (one wavey, one spiral chute) and other cool stuff. You get 90m playing for €7 (adults are free and there's a weekday-morning discount) and it's supposed to be a few euro per hour after that but Midori says they have never charged her for any over-time. You can order food and drinks inside and there are chairs and tables (but it gets pretty busy at the weekend). If they had the energy for it, the kids would stay there forever. They love it.

Lost and found

The (rather stupid) highlight this time was me losing my shiny Nexus 1 phone after a bit of rough and tumble with the kids. It took me about 3 minutes to notice that it was gone and I got in quite a fluster. I retraced my steps but couldn't find it. I got Midori's phone and phoned it and lo and behold they had it behind the counter. That could so easily have disappeared, a big thanks again to the staff.

So if you have kids and you're looking for somewhere to go some day, I would definitely recommend Spraoi, for value, service and fun.